Suspicion

“But there is nothing wrong,” Ava said. “A boating accident isn’t sexy, that’s all. They’d rather hear that Dad pushed her out of the boat or that she wanted to end it all. They start asking all these casual little questions. ‘Now, your parents were married forty years,’” she said, mimicking a reporter’s impartial tone. “‘Must have been a happy marriage.’ And you know damn well that’s not what they’re thinking.”

“So what’s he like?”

“Mr. L.A. Times?” Ava shrugged. “Kind of preppy-looking. All Gap and Eddie Bauer. Chambray shirt, cotton this and natural fiber that. Wire-rimmed glasses. Condescending.”

“Cute?”

“I didn’t notice.”

“Liar.”

“Cute. He kind of looks like Rob.”

“Please say you didn’t tell him the ‘twin princesses’ story,” Ingrid said.

“Of course I did,” Ava said. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because it’s so damn misleading.” Ingrid shook her head. “So you told him about the Boston Whalers, too?”

“And the Shetland ponies.”

Ingrid groaned.

“Well, it’s true,” Ava protested.

“It’s also true that Dad was always so busy being St. Sam to everyone on the island that he never had time for us or Mom.”

“Mom didn’t feel that way.” Ava felt her heart speed up. “She was happy. I know she was.”

“You don’t know. No one really knew what was going on in Mom’s head.”

“Ingrid—”

“No, I’m sick of you always painting this fantasy world. Did you tell this reporter that throwing money at us was Dad’s way of making up for all the things he didn’t do? Did you talk about how it was always his family who ended up paying for his generous impulses?”

“That’s your perception,” Ava said. “You’re still angry at Dad because of Quicksilver—”

“Quicksilver.” Ingrid hooted. “God, how could I have thought I was in love with a guy called Quicksilver? He was such a jerk.”

“See?” Ava said, eager to redeem their father in Ingrid’s eyes. “Dad was right.”

“Maybe he was right that the guy was a jerk, but Dad stepped over the line by booting him off the island. Dad’s like some kind of benign dictator. He needs to learn he can’t go around orchestrating everyone’s lives.” Ingrid wrapped her arms around Henri’s neck. “By the way, did you find those papers yet?”

“I tried to look last night,” Ava said. “But you know how Mom’s study is. There’s so much stuff everywhere. Books and magazines all over the place, stacks of papers—”

“She had these diaries,” Ingrid said. “They had red covers—”

“I know, Ingrid.” Ava felt a surge of irritation. “You’ve only mentioned it half a dozen times already. If it’s so damn important, you look for them. Ask Dad to get them for you.”

“Right,” Ingrid said. “The day I ask Dad for anything will be the day I walk to the mainland.”

AN HOUR LATER Ava could still feel Ingrid’s anger, like a blanket weighing her down. She was standing on the deck of the old bougainvillea-draped cottage that had once belonged to her grandmother and taking deep breaths to stay calm. She didn’t want to deal with Ingrid’s anger at their father, or Scott Campbell’s condescending smirk, or her own bad dreams and panic attacks. All she wanted was to feel peaceful again. Peaceful and safe.

“I really want to rent this place, Lil,” she told her friend from Lil’s Lovely Island Real Estate. “Actually, I’d like to buy it. I want to move in today, though. Henri would, too, right, Henri?”

Henri’s tail thumped and he gazed up at Ava in much the same way Ava gazed at pints of rum-raisin ice cream. Liquid-eyed, drooling slightly. Henri had been her mother’s dog and wasn’t coping very well, either. After Diana’s accident, his nonstop howling had driven her father to distraction. Either keep the dog with her, he’d said, or it was going to the pound. Ava felt a very strong bond with Henri.

“What’s your dad going to think about you living here, then?” Lil asked in the Eliza Doolittle accent that thirty years of living on Catalina had done little to change. “He’ll be all alone in that big house of his, won’t he?”

“Oh, he’ll be fine,” Ava said, already gearing up for her father’s resistance. After Rob died, at her parents’ urging, she’d sold the house she’d bought with Rob and moved back home. “Right after my mother…after the accident, he needed me there, but he’s fine now. Busy. You know my dad, he’s always on the go. Up at the hospital, running the asthma camp. Busy, busy.”

God, she was starting to babble. She took a breath. Henri sat so close to her leg she could feel his warmth, and she reached down to tangle her fingers in the curls on his head. My father’s fine, she thought. I need to save myself. And she felt she could do it up here in this cottage, which nestled like an overgrown shrub in the scrub-covered hillside on Middle Terrace Road. Up here, the sun was soft and filtered, and the breeze from the ocean rustled the leaves of the eucalyptus that sheltered the cottage.

Up here she’d get her life back together again. The dreams would stop and she would be able to work. Up here where, like a bird in a nest, she could see all of Avalon spread out below. The familiar sites that were part of the tapestry of her life: the Casino’s round red roof, the boats in the harbor, the Catalina Express on its daily runs to and from the mainland. The play of light and shadow. Nothing had changed and yet everything had changed. Up here maybe she could make some sense of it all.

Lil seemed dubious about the cottage’s charms.

“Mind that rotted bit in the wood, luv,” she said. “Catch your heel in that and you’ll fall head over teapot into the brambles. Need to replace the whole thing, I should think.”

Ava glanced down at the worn wood. The deck wouldn’t be all she’d have to replace, she suspected. In the twelve years since her grandmother died, the cottage had changed hands a number of times, and with each new owner it looked a little more forlorn. Now it was for rent again, which meant she could move in right away. But she really wanted to buy it and bring it back to life. Mend the house and mend herself and Henri.

“I’m afraid you’ll be buying a headache.” Lil delved into her shoulder bag and pulled out a candy, which she unwrapped and threw to Henri. He caught it in his mouth, dropped it on the deck and barked at it. “All right.” She shot him a reproving look. “Don’t make a song and dance of it—it’s just a sweetie. Honestly, Ava, you don’t want this house.”

Ava smiled. “Honestly I do.”

“There’s a lovely little house on Marilla that I just listed. Let me take you there.”

“I want this one.” She heard herself tell Scott Campbell the Catalina-princess story about stamping her foot to get what she wanted. Now she wished she hadn’t. He didn’t like her. But so what? Scott Campbell was the least of her concerns.

“The Marilla house has a lovely kitchen,” Lil persisted. “All modern. You’d love it.”

“Lil, I want this one,” Ava said again. “Let’s go back in.”

Lil followed her back into the cottage. The living room was small and square, roughly the size of the pantry in her father’s house, half the size of the guest bathroom in her fiancé’s oceanfront condo. For a moment she pictured Ed and her father—the pair tended to see eye to eye about most things—standing in the tiny room, incredulous looks on their faces. She shut out the image, walked over to the fireplace and crouched down in front of it.

“See these?” She traced her finger over the bright, blue-glazed tiles that surrounded the hearth. Every fourth tile was a vividly painted scene of activity. Under yellow suns or silver moons, stick-figure girls and boys played ball, fished, flew kites or lay tucked in bed reading a book. “I was ten when I painted these,” she told Lil. “My grandmother had a wood-burning kiln out back, and I molded the clay, painted the tiles, glazed them, the works. That’s pretty much how I got started.”

Lil bent to take a closer look. “Clever girl. They’re lovely. Like little rays of sunshine.”

“See that one with the kite? Ingrid and I got kites for Christmas one year, and our dad took us down to the beach to fly them. The sky was this brilliant blue the way it gets in December after a rain, and our kites were red, and I think Ingrid was wearing yellow shorts. But we were racing and laughing and watching the kites high up in the sky… I was trying to capture that feeling.”

“You did, luv.” Lil glanced at the door. “Well, then, shall we go?”

“This house has all kinds of good memories,” Ava said, reluctant to leave. “When Ingrid and I were little, our grandma would bring us out here and we’d watch the boats down in the harbor and she’d tell us about steamships and Charlie Chaplin and movie stars who came over. Happy memories.”

“Sometimes it would be nice to go back, wouldn’t it?” Lil’s smile was wistful. “I often think that. And then I say to myself, silly old fool, ’course it wasn’t that much better than it is these days. All you do is remember the good and forget the not-so-good.”

“Maybe.”

“’Course you’re young yet. You probably still remember everything like it was yesterday.” She patted Ava’s arm, then delved into her bag again. “Here, have a sweetie. Make you feel better. Good for your throat, too. Helps my voice, I always say.”

Ava took the candy. When she and Rob were married, Lil had sung “Ave Maria” at the wedding. She’d sung again at Rob’s funeral. “I’ll Remember You.” God, she was going to cry. “Lil, please don’t look at me like that, okay? I’m fine, I really am. If I buy this place, I’ll be so busy fixing it up I won’t have time to be sad.”

“Well, if you’ve made up your mind, I don’t suppose there’s much I can say.”

Ava smiled. “Exactly.”

“On the bright side, though, I looked up your horoscope this morning. I like to do that before I show a house. You’d be surprised how many times it’s steered me into a new direction. Like the time I was showing a gentleman this property up on Chimes Hill Road and his horoscope said, “‘Not a good day for scaling new heights.’ Well, if that isn’t telling you something. I immediately rescheduled for the next day.”

“You sold it?”

“I did. You know what his horoscope said the day we closed escrow? ‘A new start will prove beneficial.’ Listen, love, I just know things are going to start looking up for you. I feel it right here.” She tapped her chest. “The sun’s going to come out again, you’ll see.”

I’d settle for feeling normal again, Ava thought.

“Let me go in and do a bit of exploring,” Lil said when they were back at the real-estate office. “Place has been rented for so long I’m not sure who owns it anymore. I’ll find out though, luv, and give you a ring this afternoon.”

CHAPTER TWO

SCOTT STOOD IN THE cereal aisle at Von’s trying to remember whether Ellie ate Cheerios or Rice Krispies. He picked up the Cheerios, dropped the carton in the basket and then, in a fit of indecision, set it back on the shelf. Maybe she didn’t even eat cereal. Why, he asked himself, hadn’t he paid more attention? His ex-wife’s voice supplied the answer. Because you don’t pay attention, period, Scott. You’ve never been there for me, and you haven’t been there for Ellie for God knows how long.

He dumped both the Cheerios and the Rice Krispies into the basket and moved on down the aisle. Things were about to change. Ellie’s two-week visit wouldn’t be long enough to completely mend the rift in their relationship, but it was a start. He’d spent the morning cleaning and vacuuming his apartment, bought new sheets and a set of dishes and made a list of all the things they would do while she was on Catalina—a glass-bottom-boat ride, snorkeling, horseback riding in the interior. It was going to be a good visit.

His cell phone rang as he wheeled his basket to the cash register. Laura. His ex-wife had called every day since he’d arrived on the island. Some days she called twice. Usually—within earshot of Ellie, he was certain—she’d start with a list of his various transgressions and shortcomings and then she’d put Ellie on the phone. By that time, not surprisingly, his daughter was hostile and surly.

“Ellie, I know you want to go to Spain,” he said now. They’d had this conversation before. “But I don’t have the money to send you. I didn’t go to Europe until I’d graduated from college.”

“You could afford it if you still worked at the Times.” Ellie’s voice was full of indignation. “You didn’t have to quit.”

Phone shoved between his head and shoulder, Scott unloaded the basket.

“It’s not my fault you wanted to go live on some stupid island,” Ellie continued.

“You’re going to love it here, El.” Scott tried to divert her. “It’s really beautiful. We’ll go swimming, snorkeling. I’ve already bought you a bike.”

“I might not come.”

His hand froze around a can of green beans. “What do you mean? It’s all set up.”

“Mom wants me to go to Cleveland with her to see Grandma.”

He took a breath. “Is that what you want to do?”

“I don’t know.” She sighed. “Mom gets kind of lonely. I feel bad for her.”

He finished unloading the groceries, pulled out his bill-fold and waited for the cashier to ring up the total. He recognized Laura’s tactic, but he had little taste for making Ellie a pawn in her parents’ game. Better just to back off.

“Fifty-two fifty,” the cashier said.

He fished out a twenty and a ten, then realized that was all the cash he had. As he wrote out a check, he tried to remember exactly how much he had left in his checking account. The shopping expedition in preparation for Ellie’s visit had pretty much blown his monthly budget.

“Listen, Ellie,” he told his daughter, “I’m going to be disappointed if you don’t come, but I’ll leave it up to you to do what you think is best.”

“Sure, Dad,” she said listlessly. “Whatever.”

After he’d carried the groceries to his apartment, he headed back to the Argonaut and the letter he’d been trying to write to the people of Catalina. His thoughts kept drifting to Ellie and the obscure feeling that by not insisting she come to Catalina, instead of accompanying her mother to Cleveland, he’d somehow let her down.

More trouble still was the vague sense of relief he felt now that the trip was in doubt. While he loved Ellie unreservedly, the fear of not being able to pull things off and failing somehow to make her happy was a weight on his shoulders. He got up from the desk, poured a mug of coffee and sat down again. She’d told him once that he “sucked” as a dad and maybe she was right. Retreat and distance came easily to him, a little too easily. Qualities that probably didn’t do much to reassure his daughter.

He looked up from his musings to see Ava Lynsky standing in the doorway. She looked different, though, her hair or something. It took him a moment to realize it wasn’t Ava. Actually, she looked like a less-vivid version of Ava. Same build, same fine bone structure, but her hair was short and choppy, and in contrast to Ava’s Snow White coloring, this woman had the tanned complexion of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors. Her feet were clad in hiking boots and she wore jeans and a sleeveless cotton shirt.

She glanced around the cramped offices of the Catalina Island Argonaut, where undelivered stacks of last week’s newspaper vied for space with the mountain bike he’d just acquired, the small brown fridge where the previous publisher had kept her peppermint schnapps and a precarious mountain of boxes still to be unpacked.

“So you’re the new publisher, huh?” She stuck out her hand. “Ingrid Lynsky. You met my sister this morning. My father asked me to pass on a message to you. He’s supposed to give you a tour this afternoon?”

“At four,” Scott said.

“Don’t look for him before five,” Ingrid said. “My father overcommits. If he has enough time in the day to do four things, he’ll try to squeeze in six. Everybody is inconvenienced, but hey, that’s Dr. Sam for you.”

Scott scratched his ear. He could still hear Ellie telling him he sucked. “You’re not a member of the Dr. Sam fan club?” he asked Ingrid. “I thought everyone on Catalina subscribed to it.”

Ingrid laughed. “Oh, did I give you the wrong impression? I’m sorry. Dr. Sam’s a saint. Most people have to take a boat to the mainland. My father can walk.”

Scott looked at her.

Ingrid looked straight back at him, her gaze steady and unflinching. “Anyway,” she said, “just so you know, he’ll be late.”

“HOPE YOU’RE NOT expecting to make any money with that paper,” Sam Lynsky said as he pulled his Jeep back onto the road. He’d breezed into Scott’s office at five-thirty with a convoluted tale about being stopped a dozen times as he tried to get away from the hospital and everyone wanting a minute of his time. “The Argonaut’s never turned a profit in forty years. How come you bought it?”

“Escape,” Scott said before he had time to think about it. “Things on the mainland were getting ugly.”

Dr. Sam rounded the curve of Abalone Point and headed toward Pebbly Beach. “No family?”

“Divorced.” Scott glanced at the doctor, a youthful-looking sixty-year-old with white hair curling from under a red baseball cap, neat mustache and a clear blue steady-eyed gaze. “I have a fourteen-year-old daughter.”

“You going to make enough to get by?”

“I’m counting on the newspaper to provide some revenue.” He’d seen the publisher’s account books. Maybe not much by Lynsky’s standards, but he could get by. “And I’ve got some freelance assignments lined up.”

He rested an arm on the window ledge. If his head weren’t full of Ellie, he’d enjoy this tour, he thought as they turned onto Wrigley Terrace Road. Avalon Bay was behind them now, and the grey-green mountains that ringed Catalina filled the view through the windshield. The wind off the ocean felt bracing.

“That’s the old William Wrigley home up there on your left.” Lynsky waved his arm at a palatial white structure nestled in the hills. “Built in the 1920s as a summer home. Before that the Wrigleys would come over in June and stay at the St. Catherine’s Hotel. The story goes, Mrs. Wrigley woke up one morning and said, ‘I would like to live there.’ It’s a hotel these days, but when I was a boy… Hold on.”

Scott grabbed the Jeep’s roll bar as Lynsky executed a sudden hairpin curve. The doctor’s driving was a tad hair-raising.

Lynsky glanced at Scott and laughed. “You think that’s bad? In my great-grandfather’s days, before the Bannings started building real roads, they’d run stage coaches from Avalon over to the Isthmus. Six horses, galloping down the summit, hooves flying. Wooden wheels.” He shook his head. “We’re too soft these days. Want everything too easy. Where’s the challenge? Where’s the spirit? You said you’re divorced?”

“Right.”

“How long were you married?”

“Fifteen years.”

“I was married,” Dr. Sam said, “nearly forty years. Not a natural state, though, marriage. Society forces you into it, but it’s not natural. Used to have a collection of toilet paper until my wife got rid of it. Toilet paper from every country I ever visited and barf bags, empty, of course, from every flight I ever took. She threw them all out. Sorry I ever got married,” he said.

“Wouldn’t do it again, huh?”

“‘Thus grief still treads upon the heels of pleasure…’” Lynsky steered the Jeep across a stretch of brush-filled terrain. “‘Married in haste, we may repent at leisure.’”

Lynsky careered around a bend, sending Scott slamming into the passenger door. He gave up on trying to take notes. Between the doctor’s driving, his nonstop monologue and conversational threads introduced, then left dangling, he felt disoriented. Now the harbor was a dizzying drop-off to his left and they were hurtling along a mountainous ridge road, then down a canyon and up again to a view of the Pacific spread out like a blue silk sheet far below.

“Congreve.” Lynsky stopped the Jeep and they both climbed out and stood at the edge of the cliff, looking out. “The Old Bachelor. He also wrote, ‘I could find it in my heart to marry thee, purely to be rid of thee.’”

Scott decided to mull that over later. The vista below him was one he’d seen in the postcard racks in town. The glittering ocean, the yellow wildflowers that dotted the steep slopes, the landmark red roof of the Casino and the familiar white bulk of the high-speed Catalina Express. What the postcards didn’t capture was the dusty sun-warmed smell of sage and eucalyptus, the subdued hush of waves, the cries of seabirds.

“Won’t find a more beautiful place anywhere else on earth,” Lynsky said after a while. “You look at the mainland over there—” he gestured at the faint bluish outline of the Southern California coastline “—and feel pretty damn lucky you’re over here.”

Scott nodded. He’d mailed a postcard to Ellie that morning. After he’d dropped it off at the post office, though, it had occurred to him that picturesque scenery was unlikely to be a selling point to a teenage girl whose notion of paradise right now was all about shopping malls and cosmetic counters.

“There’re a lot of good people on the island,” Lynsky said after they were back on the road again. “Most of them, in fact. We’re a fairly law-abiding lot. A tourist now and then who has a few too many Wicky Whackers or Margaritas and starts making a nuisance of himself, that’s about the worst of it.”

“Suits me,” Scott said.

“You’re daughter’s fourteen, you said?” The doctor turned to look at him. “Difficult age. Suddenly you’re not a hero anymore and you can’t do a thing that’s right.”

Scott watched palms and eucalyptus and other low scrubby trees he couldn’t name fly past as the Jeep tore down another canyon. Tell me about it, he thought.

“Of course, I say that and my daughters are thirty-four and we still don’t see eye to eye. Ava’s doing okay.” Lynsky wiggled a hand. “Lost her husband three years ago, but she’s engaged to a fine man now. Attorney here in town. Got a few things in her own life to work out, but Ed’s good for her.”

Scott recalled Ava’s telling him about stamping her foot to get what she wanted and felt a stab of sympathy for the fiancé.

“Ingrid, Ava’s twin, has taken a vow of poverty,” Lynsky was saying. “Doesn’t believe in working for a living. Dropped out of medical school with one year left to go. She’s quite content to live on whatever she grows—lettuce and beets, she tells me, but who knows what else. Lives behind some horse stables on the other side of the island.” He shook his head. “I can’t figure her out.”

Scott felt vaguely defeated. If Dr. Samuel Lynsky living on an idyllic island, loved by everyone—a man who’d actually written a book on raising children—had problematic relationships with his daughters, what were his own odds? He wanted to ask the doctor what went wrong. What would he do differently?

They were headed back into town now, Dr. Sam nimbly maneuvering the Jeep through narrow streets of equally narrow houses that rose in tiers from the harbor, dodging the ubiquitous golf carts, most of them driven by tourists who rented them from stands along the seafront.

“Las Casistas over there—” Lynsky nodded at a development of pink, adobe-style cottages “—used to be housing for the island’s workers.” He leaned an elbow on the window frame. “Don’t get the wrong impression about what I just said. Ingrid’s okay. Ava is, too. Diana’s death hit them both pretty hard.” He looked at Scott. “You know about that?”

“A boating accident, I heard.”

“Three months ago. Took the boat out for a sail. Bad timing all around. I was getting over flu, and Diana had been having dizzy spells. I went below to take a nap, and when I woke up she was gone.” Lynsky pulled off his cap by the brim, replaced it a moment later. “Coast Guard, helicopters. Everyone out there looking for her. Nothing.”

“I’m sorry,” Scott said. The words seemed inadequate, but he’d never been very good at offering condolences. “How are you managing?”

“I’m fine.” Lynsky pinched his midriff. “Overdosed on casseroles for a while. People couldn’t do enough. Still can’t. Lot of talk about creating some kind of garden in Diana’s name, inlaid tiles, that sort of thing. The mayor’s asked Ava to design it.” He glanced at Scott. “You’ve met Ava?”