On Hurricane Island Read online

  No. She will not give in to fear. Breathe slowly. Use her senses and her brain. She notes the stale coffee on her breath, trapped by the hood and mixed with the tang of fear. She must think clearly, make a plan, and extricate herself from this mess. It is all a mistake, of course, but where are they taking her and why? Jess will call someone if she does not hear from Gandalf tonight. Where is her phone, her laptop, the galleys for her article? Breathe. And what about her presentation tomorrow? Sandra and Ahmed will be furious if she does not give the paper. Breathe. Jess will be worried, but she will take care of it. Who do you call in a case like this? The airport? The hospitals? And what kind of case is this, anyway? Breathe.

  The pressure on her back ceases suddenly. A hand grasps her upper arm and guides her up two short steps, pushes her onto a seat, warm like leather through her pants. Another hand grips her elbow.

  “Got her.” A female voice this time and the turbulence in her chest lessens a notch.

  The grinding of gears drowns out Troll’s response. They lurch forward, then settle into a slow, bumpy motion like the golf cart her father used to drive at Leisure World. Gandalf wants to laugh at how Mickey-Mouse it feels, except she is not at all sure her constricted throat can manage any sound at all. And ridicule, laughing at these people whomever they are, probably will not help the situation.

  The ride ends shortly with an abrupt stop. Someone grips her arm, pulling her up a short flight of metal stairs, hot under her bare feet. She stumbles and trips, stubbing her big toe. Then she is out of the sunlight, walking on carpet, pushed around a corner and down into an upholstered seat. Her hands are released from behind her back, but the right one is immediately bound to an armrest. Her free left hand reaches across her body and feels along the upholstered wall to the plastic window. Think deductively, she tells herself. She is at an airport, so this is likely a plane, too small to warrant a jetport.

  “Keep your hand in your lap, or I’ll have to tie it down,” her captor says, leaning over Gandalf to fasten the seatbelt across her waist. The guard’s hair brushes against Gandalf’s hood; it smells of fruity shampoo. Peach maybe? No, it is apricot. A series of small clicks and rustles must be the woman settling in her seat, against the background racket of propellers revving.

  “Hey,” Gandalf makes her voice friendly. Maybe Apricot-shampoo will respond, woman to woman. “Do you want to switch seats? The window is wasted on me. Unless, of course, you are planning to remove this hood.”

  “No talking.”

  Is it wishful thinking or does Gandalf detect a very small smile hidden behind those terse words? She has to find out what is happening to her and Apricot is the only available source of information. Her chemist mother, when she wasn’t flying off to lecture about the dangers of Strontium-90 in the milk supply, taught Gandalf three social graces: Mind your manners. Hold your temper. Honey catches more flies than vinegar. Gandalf teased her mother about the lack of scientific evidence on which to base her assumptions, but her mother insisted science did not hold all the answers. Over the years Gandalf has accepted her mother’s tenets, modifying the third to include humor. Not that there is anything at all funny about this.

  Keeping her voice light, Gandalf turns towards her seatmate. “Is this rendition? I thought Obama outlawed that. Are you taking me to Egypt?”

  “I said, no talking.”

  Her voice sounds young, more nervous than angry, so Gandalf continues. “I am not dressed properly. Don’t I need an orange jumpsuit to go with my black hood?”

  “Shut up.”

  Gandalf closes her eyes and leans her head against the window. The plane taxies, accelerates, then takes off steeply. Her belly lurches. The dense dark under the hood magnifies every runway bump, every small dip, every minuscule readjustment of the wings. As the small plane banks into a steep turn to the right, Gandalf’s breaths come faster, pulling the coarse cloth back and forth against her nostrils. She cannot stop herself. She unclasps the armrest with her left hand and reaches towards Apricot until she finds her arm. She clutches the smooth cotton of a uniform sleeve.

  “Please help me,” she whispers. “I’m frightened.”

  2. AUSTIN, 8:28 A.M.

  Too bad you’re scared, Austin thinks. Guess you should have thought of that before you did whatever you did. I’m your guard, not your therapist.

  The prisoner is strong for someone old enough to be a grandmother. Well, the hood makes it hard to tell how old she is, but the empty sleeve of flesh on her bony inner arm jiggles just like Gran’s. No matter what her age, Austin isn’t crazy about holding hands with the woman. Not crazy about any of this, really, but she’ll do her job and deliver the detainee securely to Special Agent Henry Ames. She glances at the soldiers in the forward seat. They’re ignoring her. What’s the harm in letting the old lady use her arm for a security blanket for a minute?

  This kind of situation wasn’t covered in training. The camp was designed to detain dangerous citizens in national emergencies. This assignment doesn’t make sense. Homeland Security is about terrorists. There’s nothing in the manual about picking up old ladies who look totally harmless and utterly clueless, certainly nothing about a detainee sniveling. Whole thing is a waste of taxpayer time and money—that’s what Pops would say—paying one green-as-grass female guard and two military escorts to bring in one grandma.

  “Treat her with kid gloves,” Special Agent Ames ordered early that morning at the mission briefing. “She’s a mathematician.”

  “I flunked algebra. Twice,” she warned Henry Ames. “I did fine with geometry though, where I could see the shapes. Triangles and rhomboids, you know?”

  He’d waved her explanations away, not interested in her high school failures. “Just help the men pick her up and deliver her here in one piece.”

  “Why are we bringing her in?” Austin asked.

  Ames looked at her sternly. “Do you remember the ‘need to know’ rule?” She nodded. “Good,” he said. “Just do your job.”

  When the plane levels, the prisoner loosens her grip. Austin pulls her arm free.

  “Sorry,” the prisoner says. Her voice quivers, then she sighs loudly. The air from her mouth blows a small bulge in the front of her hood. It looks really silly, and Austin wishes there was someone to point it out to, to share a laugh with. But forget the soldiers and there’s no one else.

  Austin is relieved when the prisoner rests her hooded head against the window and is silent. Maybe she’s sleeping, though that’s hard to believe. At least she’s quiet and that’s good, because Austin isn’t sure how to respond if the prisoner tries to talk to her again. Fraternization is a big no-no, although she’s not clear exactly what it includes. She worries that she might have stepped over the line with the other female prisoner, Norah. Just making polite small talk or answering an innocent question in the exercise yard—does that count?

  In her three-week training course Austin learned how to overpower and neutralize an aggressive prisoner. SDI: Subdue, Disarm, Immobilize. Transporting with minimum public attention. How to secure, catalog, and safely transport their effects. Effects—what a stupid word for a person’s suitcase and pocketbook and computer and stuff. Still, Austin twists around to check that the prisoner’s effects are safe on the seat behind her.

  She wonders what the prisoner’s face looks like under the hood. That’s probably irrelevant, but sometimes this whole job feels so lame, so far away from how she wants to live. Not that she knows exactly what she’s looking for, but whatever it is, it’s not on the island and not in Maine. If she can stick with this for a few months, she’ll save enough money to go someplace else, Texas probably. Pops thinks that Texas is a stupid idea, but he makes fun of this job too, even though he’s the one who pointed out the Help Wanted ad in the first place.

  “It’s not like you’re in the Army,” he likes to remind her, touching his shoulder which still aches in damp weather thanks to the Vietcong’s shrapnel gift. “Not like this is a real war.”<
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  Thinking about Pops and Gran and home, Austin closes her eyes for a minute.

  “May I have some coffee?” The prisoner’s voice jerks Austin awake.

  “You think this is some demented Starbucks?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Austin squirms. She’s a soft touch when anyone apologizes, maybe because her mother has never, not once in twenty-five years, said she’s sorry. Even for not marrying Austin’s father or for dumping a four-year-old to live with her grandparents.

  It can’t hurt to give the old lady some coffee, can it? Special Agent Ames said to treat the prisoner well. The soldiers in the front seat have coffee. She smelled it walking by their seat. If she asks, they’ll most likely give her a cup. But they’ll probably notice if she gives it to the prisoner and might tell on her.

  “I don’t have coffee,” Austin says softly. “How about water instead?”

  “Thank you.” The prisoner’s voice is ripe with tears.

  Austin isn’t good with people crying either. She positions the water bottle in the prisoner’s free hand, but oops. How is she supposed to drink wearing that hood thing? Why does she need it, anyway? She’ll see their faces soon enough. Austin glances at the soldiers—they aren’t paying attention to her or the prisoner. One guy, Sam or Stan or something, is studying a porn magazine, his thick thumb smearing the ink of an astonishingly large boob. What an asshole. Cyrus, the one with freckles and blue eyes, is Gran’s cousin but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t rat her out. He’s Army through and through, Pops says, like it’s a virtue. Cyrus slouches in his seat, automatic rifle cradled across his chest. She fingers the grip of her pistol. It’s not fair that civilian recruits are issued less firepower. They all do the same job. And she doesn’t even get to carry her gun most of the time. Cyrus jerks awake from the edge of dozing, then closes his eyes again.

  “For just a minute,” Austin says, reaching across the prisoner to lower the window shade. She unfastens the Velcro holding the cloth hood tight around the woman’s neck and lifts the hood halfway, trying to keep her eyes covered. The woman’s hair, half brown and half gray, stands straight out around her ears like a cartoon of a person scared to death. The prisoner tilts her head back to drink.

  The engine noise changes and Austin raises the window shade enough to peer out. She must have really slept because they’re already over the marshes north of Portland. Ahead, rocky fingers reach for the open ocean. The coastline is the only thing about this stupid state she’ll miss when she moves to Texas. Six months of this job, tops, and she’ll be able to get out.

  “It sounds like the plane is descending.” The prisoner’s voice slides back into her joking tone. “That was too quick for Egypt. Where are you taking me?”

  Austin gazes at the prisoner, wondering if the old woman can feel her pity. You don’t want to know, Austin thinks. People say that Hurricane Island is bad news and always has been. Parents forbid kids to go there. Too dangerous, all those old steam engines and stone drills rusting in the bushes. Grandparents whisper it’s cursed, because of how the town of Hurricane disappeared practically overnight, a gazillion years ago. Then that wilderness camp for rich kids bought the island and put up “No Trespassing” signs and they didn’t last long either.

  All the warnings and signs didn’t keep her from playing hooky one spring day in high school and paddling over with her favorite cousin Gabe. But the forlorn bits of foundations and vacant cellar holes spooked her out.

  “What happened to the houses?” she asked Gabe.

  “People tore them down for the lumber.”

  The emptiness of the village was creepy, but swimming stoned in the quarry was magic, even more so when she found the linked initials carved in the cliff. Playing hooky that day was worth the worst punishment she ever got from her grandparents. Gran was furious about Austin going to the little island but wouldn’t explain why. She wouldn’t answer Austin’s questions about the initials either, even though she looked like she knew something. Her face paled when Austin questioned her and then she left the room. “Let it be,” Pops said.

  “Where are we going?” the prisoner asks again. Maybe she can feel Austin’s pity, because all joking is wrung from her voice.

  She’ll get her answer soon enough. Austin grabs the bottle, sloshing the last bit of water onto the prisoner’s shirt, and shoves it into the seatback pocket. Give people an inch, like Pops always says. She knows she’s being rougher than necessary when she pulls the hood back over the prisoner’s head and secures it tight. But what does the woman expect? She should have thought about the consequences of whatever she did, beforehand.

  “My shoes,” the woman says. “I need them.”

  Making the woman walk around barefoot isn’t right. In fact, it’s a kind of mistreatment. But Austin is hired as a guard, not a social worker. She leans across the prisoner to slide up the window shade, revealing the edge of ragged coastline and the empty expanse of water. Directly north of the bay’s wide mouth, the Three Sisters Islands cluster like misshapen poison ivy leaves. Pops says they’re perfectly located for maximum storm damage.

  The plane circles to the north and descends. Austin has never seen The Sisters like this before, from above. On Lily Haven, wide-porched summer homes tucked along private coves are linked by gravel lanes and flanked by jewel-tone rectangles of tennis courts and swimming pools. Banking steeply to the south, they fly over the biggest island. Storm Harbor bustles with marine traffic— lobster boats and fishing craft, the ferry to the mainland, a few kayaks gliding single file along the sheltered western shore. A large tidal basin sprawls across the southern third of the land, filling and emptying to the heartbeat of the tides. Austin spots her grandparents’ house beyond the town dock, down the street from the school where Gran used to teach.

  Hidden behind Storm Harbor’s spruce-covered hills, the much smaller Hurricane Island comes into view. If Austin squints, Hurricane looks like a girl running away from her sisters—hair blowing, baggy pants billowing in the wind. The plane dips sharply, passing over the one-wharf harbor sitting in the small of the girl’s back. The prisoner gasps and clutches both armrests so tightly that the fan of tendons stands up on the backs of her hands.

  “Are we landing?”

  “Soon,” Austin whispers, not sure if that should be comforting or not. Below, a single road leads uphill from the dock—along the girl’s waist—with empty foundations and crumbled stonewalls bearing witness to the town that once flourished. Just beyond, in a tight square behind razor wire topped walls, squats the square building of the detention center. To the right are woods, and then the deserted quarry with tall granite cliffs that catch the September sunlight and smolder orange. From this height, the quarry looks insignificant and nowhere near immense enough to contain all her sorrows about Gabe and the initials.

  “Please. Where are we?”

  The runway comes into view along the backbone of the island’s ridge. Austin isn’t crazy about landings either. She tries to make her voice sound tough.

  “I told you—no talking.”

  3. HENRY, 12:14 P.M.

  Special Agent-in-Charge Henry Ames stands at his open window on the second floor of the administration wing. There’s no evidence of the hurricane yet. No sound or sight of the airplane yet, either, but he might as well head up to the airstrip. He logs off the secure computer network and sets the encryption program. Good thing he’ll have time to process the new prisoner before the hurricane hits.

  Professor G. Cohen. He supposes he’s ready for her, whoever she is. That morning he visited the women’s wing and personally inspected her cell, still smelling of sawdust. The Washington guys think it’s easy, rehabbing a decrepit Adventure Camp, making a secure facility from flimsy construction. City folk have no clue what the damp air does to buildings. Let them try to deal with wood so rotten a child could kick out the windows.

  He rubs his fist against his sternum, pushing away the smoldering ache. Better take a couple o
f antacids before it gets too bad. He’d be less stressed if the Washington guys weren’t so stingy with their information. He likes to know what is coming, not flying blind like this. Why are they interrogating this Dr. Cohen? Too bad she’s not a medical doctor; he could ask her about his heartburn. All he knows is that she’s a mathematician, an expert on something related to triangles and hurricanes, and that he is supposed to treat her with kid gloves. Mathematics? That just doesn’t make any sense, but Henry doesn’t dare ask the Regional Chief for more background. Everyone is more antsy than usual, just like every year when the anniversary of 9/11 approaches.

  Making a mental note to have someone oil the rusty hinges on his office door, Henry steps into the second floor hallway. Against his strong objections, the disaster gurus at FEMA contracted with a company from the mainland to renovate the rickety building. Henry warned them that a local firm would do better work, cheaper too, but the Chief insisted it would generate less gossip.

  As if the entire population of the Three Sisters Islands isn’t already spinning yarns about what’s going on half a mile off Storm Harbor. They all explored the little island as kids, as fascinated by their parents’ prohibitions as by the ruined village and abandoned machinery. The juicy rumor that this godforsaken place, infamous for an anarchist bombing, was chosen for Maine’s only civilian detention center is probably wagging tongues and sparking gossip from the suits in Augusta to the crunchy granolas in Blue Hill. There’s no way to keep this secret, not with Homeland Security’s unholy trinity of the Bureau and Army and FEMA running the camp, plus the tactical necessity of liaising with the local sheriff. Damn stupid Washington guys have no clue. It probably makes sense to have the Army doing Security, but FEMA in charge of Operations? Because they did so well with the trailers?