His secret. Theirs. And what might other women to come, lying awake in this same room on a night as fierce as this one, adrift in loneliness and sensation of their own, imagine about Echo’s involvement with John Leland Ransome?
Echo threw aside her down comforter and sat on the edge of the bed, nervous, heart-heavy. Except for hiking shoes she slept fully dressed, with a small flame in one of the tarnished lamp chimneys for company and a hammer on the floor for security, not knowing who in that island community might take a notion, no matter what the penalty. Ciera went home at night to be with her severely arthritic husband, and Echo was alone.
She rubbed down the lurid gooseflesh on her arms, feeling guilty in the sight of God for what raged in her mind, for sexual cravings like nettles in the blood. She put her hand on the Bible beside her bed but didn’t open it. Dear Lord, I’m only human. She felt, honestly, that it was neither the lure of his flesh nor the power of his talent but the mystery of his torment that ineluctably drew her to Ransome.
A shutter she had tried to secure earlier was loose again to the incessant prying of the wind, admitting an almost continual flare of lightning centered in this storm. She picked up the hammer and a small eyebolt she’d found in a tool chest along with a coil of picture wire.
It was necessary to crank open one of the narrow lights of the mullioned window, getting a faceful of wind and spume in the process. As she reached for the shutter that had been flung open she saw by a run of lightning beneath boiling clouds a figure standing a little apart from the house on the boulders that formed a sea wall. A drenched white shirt ballooned in the wind around his torso. He faced the sea and the brawling waves that rose ponderously to foaming heights only a few feet below where he precariously stood, waves that crashed down with what seemed enough force to swamp islands larger than Kincairn.
John Ransome had returned. Echo’s lips parted to call to him, small-voiced in the tumult. Her skin crawled coldly from fear, but the shutter slammed shut on her momentary view of the artist.
When she pushed it open again and leaned out slightly to see him, her eyelashes matting with salt spray, hair whipping around her face, Ransome had vanished.
Echo cranked the window shut and backed away, tingling in her hands, at the back of her neck. She took a few deep breaths, wiping at her eyes, then turned, grabbed a flashlight and went to the head of the stairs down the hall from her room, calling his name in the darkness, shining the beam of the light down the stairs, across the foyer to the front door, which was closed. There was no trace of water on the floor, as she would have expected if he’d come in out of the storm.
“ANSWER ME, JOHN! ARE YOU HERE?”
Silence, except for the wind.
She bolted down the stairs, grabbed a hooded slicker off the wall-mounted coat tree in the foyer and let herself out.
The three-cell flashlight could throw a brilliant beam for well over a hundred yards. She looked around with the light, shuddering in the cold, lashed in a gale that had to be more than fifty knots. She heard thunder rolling above the shriek of the wind. She was scared to the marrow. Because she knew she had to leave the relative shelter afforded by the house at her back and face the sea where she’d last seen him.
With her head low and an arm protecting her face, she made her way to the seawall, the dash of waves terrifying in the beam of the flashlight. Her teeth were clenched so tight she was afraid of chipping them.
Remembering the shock of being engulfed on what had been a calm day at the Jersey shore, pulled tumbling backwards and almost drowning in the sandy undertow.
But she kept going, mounted the seawall and crouched there, looking down at the monster waves. It was near to freezing. In spite of the hood and slicker she was already soaked and trembling so badly she was afraid of losing her grip on the flashlight as she crawled over boulders. Looking down into crevices where he might have fallen, to slowly drown at each long roll of a massive wave.
Thought she saw something—something alive like an animal caught in discarded plastic wrap. Then she realized it was a face she was looking at in the down-slant of the flashlight, and it wasn’t plastic, it was Ransome’s white shirt. He lay sprawled on his back a few feet below her, dazed but not unconscious. His eyelids squinched in the light cast on his face.
Echo got down from the boulder she was on, found some footing, got her hands under his arms and tugged.
One of his legs was awkwardly wedged between boulders. She couldn’t tell if it was broken as she turned her efforts to pulling his foot free. Hurrying. Her strength ebbing fast. Bat-ding him and the storm and sensing something behind her, still out to sea but coming her way with such size, unequaled in its dark momentum, that it would drown them both in one enormous downfall like a building toppling.
“MOVE!”
Echo had him free at last and pushed him frantically toward the top of the seawall. She’d managed to lose her grip on the flashlight but it didn’t matter, there was lightning around their heads and all of the deep weight of the sea coming straight at them. She couldn’t make herself look back.
Whatever the condition of his leg, Ransome was able to hobble with her help. They staggered toward the house, whipsawed by the wind, until the rogue wave she’d anticipated burst over the seawall and sent them rolling helplessly a good fifty feet before its force was spent.
When she saw Ransome’s face again beneath the flaring sky he was blue around the mouth but his eyes had opened. He tried to speak but his chattering teeth chopped off the words.
“WHAT?”
He managed to say what was on his mind between shudders and gasps.
“I’m n-n-not w-worth it, y-you know.”
Hot showers, dry clothing. Soup and coffee when they met again in the kitchen. When she had Ransome seated on a stool she looked into his eyes for sign of a concussion, then examined the cut on his forehead, which was two inches long and deep enough so that it would probably scar. She pulled the edges of the cut together with butterfly bandages. He sipped his coffee with steady hands on the mug and regarded her with enough alertness so that she wasn’t worried about that possible concussion.
“How did you learn to do this?” he asked, touching one of the bandages.
“I was a rough-and-tumble kid. My parents weren’t always around, so I had to patch myself up.”
He put an inquisitive fingertip on a small scar under her chin.
“Street hockey,” she said. “And this one—”
Echo pulled her bulky fisherman’s sweater high enough to reveal a larger scar on her lower rib cage.
“Stickball. I fell over a fire hydrant.”
“Fortunately. . . nothing happened to your marvelous face.”
“Thanks be to God.” Echo repacked the first aid kit and ladled clam chowder into large bowls, straddled a stool next to him. “Ought to see my knees,” she said, as an afterthought. She was ravenous, but before dipping the spoon into her chowder she said, ‘You need to eat.”
“Maybe in a little while.” He uncorked a bottle of brandy and poured an ounce into his coffee.
Echo bowed her head and prayed silently, crossed herself. She dug in. “And thanks be to God for saving our lives out there.”
“I didn’t see anyone else on those rocks. Only you.”
Echo reached for a box of oyster crackers. “Do I make you uncomfortable?”
“How do you mean, Mary Catherine?”
“When I talk about God.”
“I find that. . . endearing.”
“But you don’t believe in Him. Or do you?”
Ransome massaged a sore shoulder.
“I believe in two gods. The god who creates and the god who destroys.”
He leaned forward on the stool, folded his arms on the island counter, which was topped with butcher block, rested his head on his arms. Eyes still open, looking at her as he smiled faintly.
“The last few days I’ve been keeping company with the god who destroys. You have a good appetite, Mary Catherine.”
“Haven’t been eating much. I don’t like eating alone at night.”
“I apologize for—being away for so long.”
Echo glanced thoughtfully at him.
“Will you be all right now?”
He sat up, slipped off his stool, stood behind her and put a hand lightly on the back of her neck.