six months before. But Bud didn’t only host Lance and Lorna’s wedding celebration—he invited the newlyweds to come live at the Lodge as heads of maintenance and housekeeping. Lance didn’t know why the tragedy of Chas’s death would prompt Bud to do such a thing, but he didn’t question a gift horse, at least not until he’d accepted the gift.
Art and Penny Vaughn were invited to the wedding out of cordiality, but they stayed home. That Lorna was pregnant surprised no one, least of all the Vaughns, who could have predicted it, despite higher hopes. And when Lorna lost the baby later that summer, it was no longer necessary that such a pretty seventeen-year-old girl be married to the island ne’er-do-well, but it was too late to take it all back. It was 1969, and Lance and Lorna were already well along on the path they’d follow to the end.
In the immediate aftermath of their daughter’s death, Penny was coping far better than her husband. She was eerily composed and ministering to Art when Eden knocked on their door that morning.
“Eden. Come in.” Penny stepped aside to let her pass.
“Oh, Penny,” Eden sighed, her tone meant to impart a world of sympathy. “Oh dear, no. I won’t bother you now. I only came to see if there’s anything you needed, anything I can do . . . Have you eaten? Can I bring you something? Something for Art?”
“Eden, you’re a dear. So thoughtful. I think we’re OK. Trying to stay busy, you know. Making up the guest room for Squee . . . Lord knows Lance can’t be caring for the boy now on his own.”
Eden nodded. “I have him at the house—Squee. He’s asleep—they were up all night. I guess we all were . . .”
Penny absently lifted her hand to her ear in the gesture of a telephone. “You just give a call when he wakes up and I’ll swing by for him . . .”
“Oh, I’ll run him down to you,” Eden cut in. She waved off toward her car. “Goodness, of course I’ll bring him down to you.” For the degree of emotion in their exchange, Penny and Eden might have been discussing carpooling to Wednesday-night bingo at the VFW. This was hardly unusual for Eden, well known for her disturbingly placid reactions to events that sent others careening. Penny Vaughn, on the other hand, was a woman who regularly wept during her weekday television “stories” and was known to carry a purse-pack of Kleenex for when she teared up during a particularly moving Sunday service. But there she was, at the dawn of the most dreaded tragedy of her life, puttering about like a chickadee. Penny Vaughn was perched at a very precarious place; whenever she finally fell, it seemed clear she would fall hard.
“You sure there’s nothing I can do . . . get . . . for you?” Eden asked again.
Penny shook her head primly. “Just my sweet grandson,” she clucked. This was odder still, in that Art and Penny had never spent much time with Squee at all, had never been particularly interested in Lance Squire’s progeny. Lorna and Lance had certainly spoken poorly enough of Lorna’s folks to color Squee’s opinion of his grandparents. Some Sundays Art and Penny asked to bring Squee with them to church, to which the Squires occasionally conceded, reluctantly. Art and Penny seemed less concerned for the actual person who was Squee than for the soul they believed to be housed therein, which they felt obliged to look out for. If they could have taken that to church with them and left the ragamuffin back at the Lodge, playing in the dirt outside his parents’ ill-kept home, they would quite surely have packed the Squee-specter into Penny’s pocketbook alongside the tissues and smuggled it into the service for some necessary deep-cleansing.
Eden took a detour by the Lodge on her way back home to stop in at the Squires’ cabin and pick up some things for Squee. She parked as close as she could get to the cottage and walked past the firemen and police still on the scene, past the charred remains of what had been the laundry shack.
“Hey, Eden,” the sheriff called out as she passed. As if it were any ordinary day.
She waved. “Just picking up some clothes for the boy,” she said. The sheriff waved her along.
Inside, in the room that had to be Squee’s, there was a chest of drawers, but everything