On Hurricane Island Read online

  “I figure six months, tops,” Austin said. “Then I’ll have saved enough for Texas.”

  That’s another thing. Only natural that the girl misses her parents. But her cockamamie scheme to go find her dad in Texas, when the guy clearly doesn’t want to be a father; that’s heartbreak sure as winter.

  “You’ve got lots of family right here,” Nettie said.

  Austin made a face. “That’s part of the problem. So many cousins I can’t keep them straight. And I don’t have a single thing in common with any of them. Gabe was the only one I could stand and he’s dead. These islands are full of losers.”

  Nettie squeezed Austin’s arm. “I know how much you miss him.”

  “What about Evelina?” Ray said. “Is she a loser too?” Cousin Bert’s daughter was their Congresswoman, local girl makes good.

  Austin pushed back from the table. “You trot that woman out every time we have this conversation. I’m sick of hearing about her.”

  It was hard to argue with her, especially when he agreed with her about all those cousins. Sometimes, it felt great, like they were connected to something big and full of history. Other times, the extended family felt like a giant multi-winged and sharp-tongued albatross.

  “I know you think I’m old-fashioned, but it’s more than all those cousins,” he told Austin that day, desperately wanting her to understand. “It’s this place, this rocky, stormy, foggy, wild and unforgiving place. These islands are members of our tribe, part of our family tree. They’re living organisms, and we don’t just give up our own. Always been that way, even back in the early 1900s, with all the trouble on Hurricane. You belong here, Austin.”

  “Do I, Pops? What good is all that family to me, when I have no parents?”

  Unable to look at his wife’s face, Ray watched Austin take the uniform down and smooth the front of the beige button-down shirt. The girl didn’t mean it. She didn’t mean her words to come out sounding razor-sharp like that. When she left the room, he took Nettie’s hand, limp on the table next to her crumpled napkin, and squeezed. He hadn’t been able to think of a single word to make her feel better.

  Jeannette honks twice as her jeep pulls away. Ray leans against the mailbox and stares at the muddy liquid in his mug. He doesn’t know what tomfoolery they’ve got going on at Hurricane Island. And he can’t come up with a single comforting thing to say to his wife about their girl taking Bert’s ferry over there every day. Nettie hates the ill-fated little island with its overgrown spruce and alder groves, the forsaken quarry and rows of ruined stone houses. She believes Hurricane Island messed up her family a century ago, shamed them in the eyes of their community, and now it’s going to somehow harm Austin. Maybe she’s right, who knows? But, one thing he does know. He wishes he never showed Austin that ad in the paper.

  6. AUSTIN, 12:37 P.M.

  Austin carries the detainee’s suitcase and computer bag to the splotchy shade of an alder grove just off the tarmac. She watches Tobias argue with Henry Ames and then march the old lady down the hill. Laughing, the two Army escorts walk towards the mess hall behind the still unpainted guard tower. The whole place feels half-baked, hovering between ghost town and military outpost.

  Brushing a crinkly orange leaf off her uniform jacket, she waits. She’s hungry, but doesn’t know what to do with the prisoner’s belongings. As a civilian employee among all the military and security staff, it’s not clear where she fits in. At the bottom of the heap, most likely, expected to do what anyone tells her.

  She has a niggling feeling about this job, an uneasy sick worry like the dread of a late period, and Tobias is a big part of the reason. Her skin sizzles when he is around—there’s something bad-boy sexy about his square jaw and buzz cut and smirking energy. The other guards claim he’s a genius at getting inside people’s heads and ferreting out their secrets. Every time she looks at him, it seems like he’s been watching her and that creeps her out big time. Still, maybe the scary feeling just goes with the territory. Interrogation is part of their work—questioning people who are dangerous to the government. But other than Tobias, in three weeks on the job she hasn’t observed anything more exciting than a training DVD on sleep deprivation techniques. The acting was so bad the trainees treated it like a comedy until Henry Ames came in and scolded them.

  “Coombs,” Henry Ames calls her name from the tarmac. “I’ll take those bags. After lunch, report to the Women’s Wing. I want you with our professor during her interrogations.”

  At the mess hall, she buys a cheeseburger. She scans the six or seven employees in the room but there’s no one she wants to sit with, especially not the two Army guys from the morning mission. She wraps the burger in a napkin, slips out the side door and across the road. To her right stands the kudzu-choked remains of the bombed-out quarry headquarters. It’s an eyesore, even with the magenta flowers still blooming. Why haven’t they torn it down? She turns away and takes the path through the woods. If she hurries she can eat by the quarry and still be back in time.

  Emerging from the woods, she stops for a moment to look around, to breathe deeply. The afternoon sun ignites the gray-pink cliffs and releases the tang of spruce. The green water sparkles in the sunlight. Too bad quarry swimming is totally off limits to the camp staff. Grounds for immediate dismissal, Henry Ames warned in orientation. Austin walks along the path carved into the cliff face, thirty feet or so above the water level. There’s no regulation against taking her lunch break away from the detention center, where other employees aren’t likely to wander. She doesn’t want to hang out with any of them. Besides, she’s been thinking a lot about the initials these past weeks working out here, especially since early this morning, seeing the quarry from the air.

  She isn’t sure she can even find the initials again. It’s been what—eleven years—since she was here with her cousin Gabe. Everything looks different now, smaller and shabbier. The rocky ledge seems narrower and the quarry water a little scummy. She eats and walks slowly, one hand skimming the sun-baked cliff. She studies the cliffs until the rock contours look familiar. She stops at a shallow gap in the rock, deep with shadows. That’s the place.

  Austin pops the last bite of burger into her mouth and feels inside the tapered crevasse. Nothing. Is her memory wrong? No, this has got to be the place. She reaches in again, a little further, sweeping her hand back and forth in an arc across the smooth stone, hoping no spiders have made their home there. With her arm fully extended and at chest level, her fingers touch the delicate ridges of the leaves, and trace the letters and numbers inside.

  MEC + AF. 1914.

  She was fourteen the day Gabe convinced her to skip school and paddle over to the little island. He was three years older and so cool. Leaning back against the cliff face, sleepy with the exertion of their swim and Gran’s thick cheddar sandwich and the lingering effects of weed, she had raised her arms over her head and caressed the granite wall. She was sweeping her hands back and forth across the stone, wishing someone would touch her with such light fingers, when she felt the cooler stone in the narrow gap. Her fingers found the carving, and she tried to read it like Braille. She couldn’t figure it out so she stood up and peered into the shadows to get a better look.

  “Gabe,” she called. “Over here.”

  He was dozing, stretched out along the ledge with his arm dangling down towards the water. He opened one eye. “What?”

  In another setting, Gabe would have made a smart-ass remark about the carving, like hoping the artist—whoever he was—at least got laid. There were linked initials and Class of Whatever cut into stone all over the Three Sisters Islands. But these were different—the isolated spot for one thing. And 1914—they were so old, almost a century. Plus, Gabe said they were a class act. Like many of his generation, Gabe’s great-grandfather had worked in the quarries as a young man, and Gabe was fascinated by the craft of sculpting stone. Even with part of the carved foliage broken off, the circle of intertwined branches and leaves was elegant,
full of grace, like something you’d see in a museum. Gabe explained that instead of being cut into the cliff, the stone around the letters had been carefully chipped away. “That’s called intaglio,” Gabe said. “Someone with real skill carved this.”

  Austin usually ignored Gabe’s history trivia, but the carving intrigued her. For weeks afterwards as she tried to fall asleep at night, she wove sleepy scenarios about the couple who made their affection last forever. Who were they and why was the carving in that place, in that shadowy nook of the quarry cliff, a spot so hidden you’d have to know it was there? Thinking about it made her feel weird, as if their love was a ghost message whispering to her from the distant past. And Gran’s anger, her sorrow, about the place just added to the mystery. There was something important about the initials and the cave, and it was connected to her family.

  “What happened in 1914?” she had asked Gabe.

  “Did you sleep through history class?” he asked. “Ever heard of World War I?”

  When he turned eighteen the next year, Gabe announced he was going to enlist and go to Iraq. She hated the idea of him as a soldier and argued so fiercely he finally told her to piss off, that someone had to stop the terrorists. After that, she had to rely on town gossip for news about his deployment. She hadn’t had an email from him in months when she heard about the IED. She still dreamed about Gabe’s funeral—his dad Bert expressionless in the front row of folded chairs, the flag folded in a triangle, clutched against his chest. Gabe’s girlfriend Lissa sat next to Bert and looked straight ahead. It was kind of spooky that Lissa’s father Henry was now Austin’s boss. Leaning forward in her seat, Austin had stared at a small clump of earth stuck to one of the white stars. She wasn’t sure if she was allowed to touch the flag but the dirt bothered her so she reached to brush it off. Gabe’s half-sister Evelina turned around and gave her a nasty look. Evelina wasn’t elected to Congress or anything yet back then, just bossy.

  After Gabe died, Austin didn’t return to Hurricane Island, not even on Senior Skip Day when the class turned the quarry into their own private pool party. She could picture her classmates spreading their beach towels along the mammoth slabs of stone at the north end of the quarry, dropping fishing nets of beer cans into the deep water to keep them cold. She stayed home that day. It would have been a betrayal to party in Gabe’s favorite place without him. Would have been a betrayal to Gran too, even though Gran won’t ever talk about why she hates the little island so much.

  The sun slides behind a cloud, and Austin shivers. Ironic that she ends up working here on the damned little island. But if she’s ever going to get out of Maine, it’ll take more than bagging groceries at the IGA. The need for a job overpowers the sad spookiness of the place. Checking her watch, she hurries along the ledge and through the woods. Tobias is fierce about punctuality. When she reported tardy to him the first day, when it wasn’t even her fault because Special Agent Ames kept her late, Tobias’s ears had flushed red as he explained the importance of being on time for duty.

  He is waiting for her now on the porch of the Women’s Wing, his face dark with anger.

  7. TOBIAS, 1:14 P.M.

  In the basement observation room, Tobias presses the console power button for Women’s Barracks Room 4. He studies both views of the new detainee’s cell on the split screen. Camera A, hidden in a knot on the pine doorframe, is aimed at the empty bed. From its vantage point at the center of a painted beach plum in the frame of the small mirror over the sink, Camera B provides a close-up of the prisoner. She stands at the sink, hands splayed over her face, staring at the mirror through the spaces between her fingers.

  “Hand-painted mirrors?” Henry complained when Tobias brought him the requisition to sign. “This is a detention camp, not a country inn.”

  Tobias hates having to justify his tactics, especially to a thickheaded guy like Henry. “We need a decorated frame,” he explained, censoring the annoyance out of his voice, “to hide the camera lens. Most prisoners stare into the mirror, even talk to themselves. But if you don’t want top notch, we can just go with the one camera angle.”

  Reluctantly, Henry signed.

  When Tobias zooms in for a close-up, the red blotches under the woman’s eyes become clearly visible between her fingers. He sees the scrap of black fabric at the same moment she reaches for it and pulls it from her hair. It must come from the hood, because she tosses it into the trashcan with an expression of distaste and fury. She pulls up the legs of her khakis and examines her scraped knees, then turns on both taps. She frowns when the hot water knob spins without resistance.

  “Sorry there’s no hot water, or band aids and antiseptic in the medicine cabinet,” he whispers to the monitor screen. “Complain to the management.”

  He checks the clock. He ordered the new girl to search the prisoner’s effects and then come and report to him. Of course, he already examined everything himself. If you want something done right, do it yourself. His staff doesn’t get that, not even the two Bureau guys, never mind the turkeys assigned to him by military intelligence. He hears their bitching that he hogs the surveillance camera assignments to himself. They think he’s lazy, wants to just sit and watch a monitor, but it isn’t that, not at all. He’s the most qualified. He’s the one the Regional Office sent to the Homeland Security course on advanced domestic surveillance techniques. It takes special training to be able to discover things from observation. Do those other guys know how to ID a terrorist by their gait? Bet they can’t look at a suspect’s stride length or how he swings his arms and determine if he’s planning to blow up an embassy. Okay, so Tobias can’t do that either, not yet, but he’s working on it, and at least he knows it can be done.

  Even Henry Ames doesn’t understand the fine points of the surveillance-interrogation continuum. It’s hard to treat the boss with deference when he doesn’t command Tobias’s respect. Henry simply lacks the hunger, the craving to know every detail that a really top-notch interrogator needs. Besides, how can you admire a man with such small feet? Tobias smirks to himself. Isn’t that supposed to signify a small dick?

  The prisoner hasn’t moved. Tobias wishes she would sit on the bed, so he can switch Camera A to whole-screen mode. Maybe she’ll cry, or take off her clothes or something interesting. Something revealing, he means, something that will help him get beyond the bitch’s defenses. Henry calls her Dr. Cohen, as if polite address makes any sense here. Tobias prefers the tactic of taking away their names, stripping them of individuality, and assigning them numbers. When Tobias suggested the numbers, Henry wagged his index finger back and forth and reminded him that these are citizens, not enemy combatants. What’s the difference; they’re all dangerous, right?

  So, he goes ahead and gives each detainee a number. A simple system based on the order in which they’re interned. Starting at 500, so the population won’t seem so puny. This one—Cohen—she’s #524. That’s how he labels the surveillance disks and that’s how he thinks of her. That’s how he will address her tomorrow or the next day, when the time is ripe to start the interrogation. Not too soon. You’ve got to make them wait. Make them worry about it until they want the questioning to start, crave it, so they don’t have to wait anymore and because they think reality can’t be worse than their fears.

  Except, of course, it can be.

  At the tentative knock on the door, Tobias puts both cameras on auto-record and turns off the monitors. Need to know: that’s the Bureau’s key rule about data security. He’ll review the tapes later. Exquisite attention to detail, that’s what leads to important breakthroughs in intelligence work.

  He has no idea why Henry hired this Austin Coombs. She has no experience—not military, not Corrections, not even ROTC at the fourth-rate college listed on her application, where she dropped out before graduating. Just because her family is local, that’s no reason to think she’ll be useful. Of course, they need a female guard to babysit the female detainees, and she does look strong, though maybe that’s jus
t the hardy island stock. She’s not really his type, with her olive skin and dark hair, but she has a great ass.

  “Enter.” Might as well see if she has any smarts at all.

  Austin’s glance goes immediately to the bank of monitors. Tobias smiles to himself. I’m too smart for you, green-girl, he thinks.

  “Okay,” he says. “What did you learn about #524 that might be useful in our interrogation?” Might as well train this one the right way.

  Austin hesitates. “I think she’s … you know, queer. I mean, gay.”

  Tobias looks at the girl. “Evidence?”

  “Some photos on her laptop. And her emails, if you read between the lines and use a little imagination. She lives with someone named Jess.”

  Not bad.

  “Could I ask you a question about this place?” She doesn’t wait for his answer. “Why build the center here, on this island, instead of like in Egypt or someplace?”

  “So we can detain and interrogate domestic terrorists quickly.”

  “But this place is so dinky.” She blushes. “So small.”

  “Small is good. During the Japanese internment program, the biggest problems were at the larger camps where troublemakers could organize. We have dozens of facilities, easy to hide and easy to control, just like this one.” He’s proud of the network, all those men ready to keep the nation safe.

  “But why not put them on military bases? They’re already set up, with security and everything.”

  “The military has too many rules and regulations. We prefer more flexibility.” He stands up. Enough questions.

  “Just one more thing,” Austin says. “I looked through the prisoner’s suitcase and her computer, but her cell phone is gone. It was in her pocketbook when I took her off the plane, but it’s not there now.”