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It rang a half dozen times before Frasier’s foggy voice answered. “Hello?”
“Hi, Frasier. It’s Oliver. I’m sorry to wake you. I tried the Dellawisp, since I knew Mom’s place had been cleaned out, but there’s a lock on the gate now. And then I thought I saw… I’m just really tired and I need someplace to sleep. I’m outside your gates. Can I come in?”
There was some fumbling, as if Frasier was getting out of bed. “You’re already on the island?”
“I pushed through the past couple of days on the road.”
“Hold on,” Frasier said; then the gates opened as if pushed by an invisible hand. “Come on up.”
As the large blue house came into view, the light over the front door popped on and illuminated the front porch with its Doric columns. All of a sudden it came to Oliver in a flash of insight.
He knew what the Rondo resort reminded him of. It remindedhim ofthis house.And the relentless feeling that everything was going to be okay once he started working there was the feeling he always got when saw this place. Because inside was the one person he knew would be there for him, no matter what, the embodiment of the hope that Mallow Island had always represented—the hope that we truly could change.
Way to ignore the obvious,he told himself as he parked in front and put his head to the steering wheel with an incredulous chuckle. He was at risk of bursting into full-blown, punchy, so-tired-you-can’t-stop-even-though-it’s-not-funny laughter, when he looked up again to see that the front door was now open.
Frasier had stepped outside, his dark skin glowing under the yellowy porch light. He was wearing pajamas with the initials RFA embroidered on the breast pocket, for Roscoe Frasier Avanger. Only those closest to Roscoe Avanger called him by his middle name. Oliver had never thought of him as famous, but he’d seen him interact with adoring readers, one of which used to be his own mother, enough to know why he valued his secret identity so much.
Frasier smiled through his long white beard, a much more convincing beard than the fake one he used to wear years ago to try to do errands on the island. He’d finally grown out his own hair and beard, obliterating the bald head and clean-shaven jaw made famous by every author photo ever taken of him, which had once been a source of great vanity to him. He lifted his knobby hand high in the air in welcome.
Oliver got out of the car and wearily climbed the steps. Frasier held out his arms and Oliver walked into them. He stayed there a long time, until Frasier finally clapped him heartily on the back afew times and stepped away to motion him inside. Oliver wiped his eyes and walked past his old friend into the quiet stillness of his home.
Frasier then closed the door against the claggy night air.
And the porch light went out.
Chapter Seventeen
A tropical, three-blade fan was spinning overhead. It confused Oliver when he opened his eyes, because Garland’s room didn’t have a ceiling fan. He turned his head and looked around the room with its coastal blue walls and white wainscoting. It slowly came to him that he was no longer in California. He was back on Mallow Island. He sat up, achy from a week of travel, and took his phone from the bedside table to check the time. It was just past noon.
He got up and showered, then went down the grand staircase in search of Frasier. The squeaking of his sneakers on the hardwood floors was the only sound in the eerie quiet. He used to love the cleanliness of Frasier’s house, but it had been a long time since he’d stayed here and he’d forgotten how quiet it was.
Oliver eventually wound his way into the kitchen and found Frasier’s longtime housekeeper Rita wiping down countertops that were already spotless. A haunting song was coming from the radio over the sink, something gospel. Oliver cleared his throat and sheturned. She immediately went to him, enveloping him in a fierce hug. It made him smile, because she was a large, soft woman and it made him remember the alarming feeling of being swallowed when she would hug him as a little boy.
“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” she said, pulling back and holding his face in her doughy hands. “I was so sorry to hear about your mama.”
“Thanks,” he said. “Is Frasier around?”
“No, but he left you a note.” She patted his face before pointing to the whiteboard by the walk-in pantry. On it, Frasier had written:Oliver, come to the Dellawisp when you get up so you can see the work that’s been done. Rita, for God’s sake, NO MORE CHICKEN BOG TONIGHT! I’m tired of it! Make something special for Oliver.
“You don’t have to make anything special for me,” Oliver said.
But she was already fussing, bringing things out of the refrigerator. “I want to. When was the last time he had visitors? He’s excited. Sit down,” she said, indicating the sunny kitchen nook overlooking the pool. “I’ll make you some fried ham and tomatoes.”
“You don’t—”
“And have you show up there hungry? I don’t think so,” she said.
An hour later Oliver drove away from Frasier’s house, full of food and local gossip, of which there had been plenty. When he arrived at the Dellawisp minutes later, he parked next to Frasier’s old pickup. Frasier owned a Mercedes that probably had less than ten thousand miles on it because he drove it only when he had to be Roscoe Avanger. And that hadn’t been for years. When Oliver got out, he glanced over to the dumpsters. Had he imagined it all last night? There was room enough for a person to hide between them and the alley wall, but who would do that? At the Dellawisp gate, he pulled on it to see if it had been left open, but it was still locked. Hewondered if this new security had something to do with trespassers. The Dellawisp was so hard to find that it had never been a problem before. His mother had been hyperaware of everything that had gone on, so they would have known.
He took his phone out of his jeans pocket to call Frasier to let him in, but before he could, he heard a man’s voice call out, “Can we help you?”
Oliver angled his head to see through the bars. He could make out three people—a man and two women—standing on the patio beside his mother’s. “I’m here to see Frasier,” he said.
“Oliver?”That could only be Zoey. She was dark-haired like he remembered her mother, with those same arched eyebrows. But she was a lot taller and thinner, with legs that didn’t seem to have a beginning or an end. They made her seem as fluid as a jellyfish moving through water as she ran across the garden to the gate. The birds swooped at her and she put her arms up like Tippi Hedren in a Hitchcock movie, but she didn’t break her stride.
When she reached him, she put her hands on the bars and looked at him through them, her dark eyes wide. “Itisyou! Frasier said you were coming back, but he didn’t know exactly when. It’s been forever since you’ve answered a text. I was getting worried.”
Her presence blew over him like a fresh breeze. He found himself smiling at her, a little goofily. He must still be travel-drunk. “It was an intense road trip.”
