anyway: “SO WHY DID YOU DO THAT?”
The boy, unruffled by Anders’s ire, looked back at the camera. “Hey—can I have that?”
“Oh, for the love of . . . YES!” Anders felt sure he had never met a more infuriating boy in his entire life. “If you answer my question.”
The boy’s entire face lit up, and then he cocked his head, as if trying to remember the question Anders had asked. Then he shrugged. “Ma says just because we can’t see him, doesn’t mean Piper can’t.” And he snatched the camera out of Anders’s hand, picked up the brown paper bag from the ground, and bounced off, leaving Anders standing there with his mouth gaping.
And Anders came to his second realization of the day: Maybe a woman thinking her dead husband was alive wasn’t the strangest thing in the world.
Maybe the strangest thing in the world was a whole town pretending they could see him, too.
And a shiver ran down his spine as he came to his third realization of the day: Perhaps he had missed the biggest story on Frick Island. But he was pretty sure he had found it now.
Chapter 9
Six Months Before the Storm
Standing at the tin basin that served as a sink in her tiny carriage house kitchen, Piper attacked the hardened traces of chocolate icing left in the mixing bowl with a sudsy sponge, but her mind was on caddis flies.
She’d been keeping an informal count of them a few times every year, since her mother first taught her how to identify their larvae—the way they were constructed out of leaf matter, sand, and sticks, some of them free-floating on the currents in the marsh. If you didn’t know what you were seeing, they just looked like any other organic debris in the water. The numbers always varied, went up and down, but the past few years they’d been steadily going down—and last week she hadn’t seen any at all.
An unexpected cold hand gripped her waist beneath her shirt.
“Tom!” Piper shrieked, nearly dropping the bowl she’d been rinsing under the torrent of water. “I thought you were sleeping.” He did that some afternoons. Not often, but just on those days when the early wake-up time caught up with him, and he was bone weary from pulling in nets and cages from the ocean’s bowels, beneath the tireless sun.
“Who can sleep with all the racket going on in here?” he said, his cold nose finding her neck beneath all her hair. It was late October, two days before Halloween, and fall had come raging through the island on a sharp cold breeze, chilling Piper to the bone. She shivered, and turned into her husband.
Husband. Would she ever tire of that word?
“Oh! I forgot. I found something today.” She left Tom’s embrace and, giggling, crossed the tiny room, stopping in front of the bookcase. “Gimby brought it in.” Tom watched patiently, amused, as he already knew the “something” Piper found was going to be a record.
It was a collection she had started years ago, when they were walking through Gimby’s antiques shop after school one day—neither one wanting to go home, to be away from the other for a second. They were browsing through dusty old albums, obscure ones with psychedelic covers that Gimby had picked up from yard sales on the mainland over the years. Problem was, people rarely got rid of anything good—so the collection was mostly music no one had ever heard of. Piper had stopped at an electric blue cover, a word catching her eye.
“Well, we have to buy this one,” she’d said.
Tom had glanced at the band name—the Who—surprised Gimby had something recognizable, and then at the song title Piper was pointing at: “Tommy Can You Hear Me?”
It became the first of many in Piper’s “Tom” record collection.
Now, in their den, she clapped her hands together, the excitement spreading her already large smile wider, her brown eyes even brighter. “Listen!”
A catchy banjo riff twanged into the air and a woman’s southern drawl spoke over the top of it. “It’s Dolly Parton,” Piper whispered, still grinning. She held up a finger. “Wait for it.”
Tom cocked an eyebrow at her but did as he was told. They listened as Dolly told her story, something about tent revivals, and then finally, the words Piper—and Tom—had been waiting for.
So preacher Tom wherever you may be—
“It’s called ‘Preacher Tom’! Have you ever heard of it?”
Tom shook his head no as Dolly started singing.
“This is . . .” Tom