Marrow Island Read Online Free Page B

it’s about rebirth. I open my eyes and steal glances at the others. Their cheeks are rosy from cold, damp work outdoors all morning. They look content; stoic. I close my eyes again. I smell the rich, earthy stew steaming in our bowls. The hands in mine are rough and light, like driftwood.

Three
    THE ISLANDS

     
ORWELL ISLAND, WASHINGTON
OCTOBER 9, 2014
     
    THE LAMP UPSTAIRS still glowed from the window of Rookwood when I set out for the village, so I walked across the lane and up the drive to introduce myself. No one answered my knocks and there wasn’t a sound from the house.
    Julia Swenson died when I was in high school, and a nephew had taken over her estate for the rest of the Swenson clan, who were in Boston or New York, somewhere back east. If I had ever met the nephew, I couldn’t recall. My mother had once called him “an odd one”—some friends staying at the cottage had reported a run-in with him; he had been friendly but extremely drunk.
    The curtains were drawn in all the windows along the porch. I walked around the house. There wasn’t a car in the drive, so I took my time, looking over the place. I peeked in the door of the carriage house—a half-barn, half-garage structure beyond the house. There was a small car parked inside, covered in dirty tarpaulins, though a faded red corner of the rear gleamed in the dim space. At the back door, I noticed something strange: what looked like a piece of cloth, stuck in the crack. I peered in the window: the door had been closed in haste and caught the edge of a raincoat hanging from a hook on the mudroom wall. I tried the knob—it was barely latched; the door swung open with a nudge.
    Having come this far, I knocked on the door and called inside. “Hello? Mr. Swenson?” There was no response. I put one foot inside and half my body, craning my neck to see up the stairs and into the kitchen. There was a distinct odor of kitchen trash, rotting food. I pulled back, carefully closing the door.
    He must have been out of town. Bachelors weren’t known for their housekeeping. Something struck me as off, but I brushed it aside. Julia was gone; it had been so many years.
    I walked back down the lane to my car, feeling the house watching me with one bright eye.
    Some people always left a light on when they left home, to ward off thieves.
     
    I drove the long way round the island to the village. If Orwell Island had a primary artery, it would be Hornsea Road, which breaks off from the village’s main thoroughfare, Anchorage Street, and circles the island’s perimeter almost completely. Almost. Hornsea doesn’t actually go all the way around the island. It dead-ends by a small county park with a turnabout. But if you drive on, about twenty yards past the turnabout, the pavement gives out to pitted gravel.
    Locals know that after a quarter mile of increasingly rutted road along the shore, there is an unmarked, abrupt left turn into the trees, and a hard-pack gravel road that turns into asphalt just out of sight. Up the slope the fir trees become denser, the woodland changing from straggler pines and madrones to hardy fir and hemlock and Western red cedar. The road continues for almost four miles, where it eventually meets Anchorage Street at the south end of Orwell Village with a rusted sign that says NO OUTLET . The road is old, but the asphalt is younger than I am. It follows a track that ran around the island before Orwell was even a town, back when it was a trading post for the Coast Salish people and the Europeans who came after Vancouver’s expedition. It was our shortcut, those of us who lived on that side.
    I drove the grassy, rutted track to the place where asphalt appeared out of nowhere. Then three-quarters of a mile on, at the site of an aborted housing development, I pulled off the road into a weedy patch of gravel. All along the road ahead, between stands of taller trees, were more of the same weedy, treeless spaces: parcels of land, marked and cleared,