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“Stop, stop!” she wanted to shriek, but her body shuddered with fear and her cries now were no more than whimpers.
“Miss Catherine . . .”
She peered around herself but couldn’t see for her sudden, all-encompassing blindness.
“Miss Catherine . . .”
Earl. Of course, it was Earl . . . who’d rowed her to Echo Island with supplies for Mary. Only, Mary was dead. Stabbed through the heart.
“Earl?” she whispered feebly.
“Right this way,” he told her soothingly, and his hands grasped her by the elbows.
She collapsed into Earl’s arms and quavered, “Take me back. Please . . . take me back. . . .”
“What did you behold?” he asked as he helped her into the boat.
Death, she thought, a chill as cold as the deep settling into her soul.
Now the memory faded away, and Catherine opened her eyes in the dark to find herself in her own room at Siren Song. Her vision had returned from that momentary blindness, but currently all she could see was a faint strip of light slipping in through the small window above her bed. Lifting her head, she realized she was alone. No Earl . . . no corpse of her sister. The dream was fading. With trembling fingers, she lit the oil lamp on the nightstand beside her bed.
It had been the same each night this week, ever since she’d returned from Echo Island. The memory of what she’d seen and her own reaction to it was caught in a recess of her brain, and her subconscious pulled it out every time she went to bed.
“Earl?” she said now, unable to stop herself, even though she knew there was no one there. She peered anxiously into the dim corners of the room. She had done it each time she’d woken, and had been met with the same response: nothing.
Of course, he was not there. Earl was the only man allowed on the Siren Song grounds by her own decree, and even he would not be on the second floor and certainly not in her bedroom. She was merely reliving those terrible moments after she’d found her sister. Again.
Awake now, she remembered how her blindness had receded in time for her to see Earl’s eyes lift from her shivering form and move back toward the cabin as he rowed with strong arms away from the deadly stony shore. She’d looked back, too, toward her sister’s cabin, the only building on Echo Island, the place where she’d exiled her sister, whose mind had rotted long before her earthly body.
What did you behold?
Now Catherine climbed from her bed, her bones feeling as old as time, though she was scarcely fifty-one. Earl, truculent at the best of times, had asked her what she’d beheld . She’d been unable to voice the words. It was beyond belief, but she, who had commanded and ruled her family with iron surety and a belief in the rightness of what she’d done, had been reduced to a quivering mound of flesh on that boat ride back to the mainland. She couldn’t tell him that she’d left her ailing sister on that island and that someone—something—had driven a knife through her chest and left her to turn to dust.
Grabbing up a shawl, she pulled it over her nightgown and cracked open the door to the second-floor hallway. It was dark as pitch, and she relied on the weakening light from her oil lamp and the rail guiding her hand to move along the upper hall and then down the stairway to the first floor, where the generator supplied power and illumination. In the kitchen she snapped on the overhead light, and the shadows were chased back, revealing a black stove—once wood, now electric—and a long pine trestle table with rows of wooden chairs. They had a refrigerator and a deep porcelain sink, but no automatic dishwasher. The lodge had been designed and redesigned and retrofitted and changed, but when Mary’s mind had weakened and her lovers, and children, had grown in numbers, Catherine had been forced to take charge. She’d stopped everything.
What did you behold?
Earl had helped her kidnap Mary years before. He’d seen the need, too, though he said nothing, and when Catherine had asked him to ready the abandoned cabin on Echo Island—a small rock jutting from the Pacific, not horribly far out to sea, but treacherous and private and left alone by the superstitious locals—he’d silently nodded his agreement. The island was owned by the Rutledge sisters and was rarely visited. The last time a couple of drunken teens had tried to put their boat ashore, the craft had smashed against the rocks and they’d died for their efforts, their bodies floating to the lighthouse on a nearby spit of land that was islanded at high tide. Their parents set up a hue and cry, wanting something to be done, trying to blame everyone and anyone other than their foolish children, who’d stolen someone’s boat and rowed out to try to see the old woman on the island. The sheriff’s department sent out a boat, which was subsequently ripped from stern to stern on the submerged rocks and nearly caused mor
e deaths. After that Catherine merely received a call, as she was the owner of record. She’d lied, saying that she sometimes stayed at the cabin and the overworked county deputies had given up any further attempts to reach the island. Earl, an accomplished seaman, would not go to Echo unless the weather could be counted on, and even then the crossing could be dicey. The summer months were the best, but there was really only one place to dock safely and you still had to know how to approach it.
Earl had spent the better part of the year before Mary’s incarceration preparing the cabin, getting to the island whenever he could. Both he and Catherine had been much younger then, and when the time came, they merely gave Mary a mixture of narcotic herbs to lull her to sleep. When her latest lover finally roused himself and realized he couldn’t wake her, he’d stumbled from Siren Song, blinking in fear. Catherine had locked the gates behind him, the last man. She and Earl had then packed Mary into his truck, and he’d done the rest, while Catherine stayed at the lodge with Mary’s children, the girls, who were now women. She’d lied to them, too. Told them Mary had died from a fall and was buried in the graveyard behind Siren Song, their lodge. They were young enough to accept it, and though they’d cried, Mary had always been less of a mother to them than Catherine and they’d accepted Catherine’s story without question. They sometimes knelt beside the grave and left flowers for their mother, and every time Catherine’s heart gave a little clutch, but no one knew the truth except for Catherine and Earl and, of course, Mary.
But now Mary was dead. Killed. Stabbed through the chest and left lying on her back in her bed, her skeletal hand still around the knife’s hilt. Catherine knew the corpse couldn’t have remained in that position. Someone had staged her. Had murdered her, then had come back at least once and molded her hand around that knife. Catherine had been too terrified to look closely the day she discovered Mary. She had screamed and thrashed her way outside—her mind trying to shut out the sight—and hadn’t been back since. But she knew the staging had been purposely done, and she suspected it was a message meant for her . . . or maybe all of them at Siren Song. A message to Mary’s children, the women of Siren Song, the women with the “gifts.”
Who? Why?
She shivered, wondering if she knew, but as her thoughts turned in that direction, she forced them back to the furthest recesses of her mind. No. No . . .
Sitting at the table, she watched the sun rise through the east window. It had been the better part of a week since she’d found the body. Today she would tell Earl what she’d beheld. And she would ask him to bring Mary back to Siren Song, and they would bury her somewhere in the graveyard behind the lodge, not in the grave with her name on it, unfortunately, as that one was already filled with another’s body.
CHAPTER 1
November . . .
Middle of the day, and it was as gloomy as night. Rain spattered Detective Savannah Dunbar’s windshield as her vehicle bumped along the cracked and broken drive, and she worried that the precipitation might turn from a misting swirl to an out-and-out deluge of renowned Oregon rain. She was wearing sneakers with her black pants and blouse. Not exactly regulation, but in her condition she didn’t much care.
She had caught the call that had come into the Tillamook County Sheriff’s Department, and had said she would check out the abandoned property that was reported to have evidence of squatters. She was driving back from lunch, and Bankruptcy Bluff—well, Bancroft Bluff, though anyone who knew the tale of the doomed homes slowly sliding off the dune into the Pacific referred to the debacle by its nickname—was right on her way.
