Three Dog Island Read online

  Jasper carried one section of his new piece into the gallery to set by the window. He always occupied the prime spot. Rightfully so. Not only was he one of the founders of the artist co-op but he was by far the best-known artist in the area.

  Army and I stepped closer to Jasper’s new sculpture. It was a group of musicians, standing in a circle, playing their instruments. Every detail of their lives was carved into their faces, the sadness, despair, anguish, and the joy from playing their music. This was no ordinary artist. I could almost hear the jazz music they were playing.

  “What do you think?” Jasper asked us.

  “Intriguing,” Army said.

  “Amazing.” I was ready to snatch back the application that I’d turned in to display my mundane ceramic pottery in the same co-op as an artist such as Jasper Rosenthal.

  “I take that to mean you like it? At least you’re not repulsed by it?”

  “Repulsed?” I repeated. “It’s truly extraordinary, Jasper.” I shook my head, staring at his work in wonder.

  “That means a lot coming from you, Jenny.”

  As I pulled my eyes from his work, I felt my forehead wrinkle in bewilderment. “From me?”

  “Winnie Wainwright’s niece.”

  Of course. Besides having been his friend, my Aunt Winnie too was a legend on this island, a well-known artist, and a fellow founder of the art co-op.

  “It’s inspirational, Jasper.” I had a sudden urge to go home to my pottery wheel. “You think that clay will be coming in next Wednesday?” I confirmed with Army.

  “Should be.”

  “You need some clay?” Jasper asked.

  “You bought out the last of mine,” Army said. “Jenny stopped in to buy some, but we’re out.”

  “Well, stop by my place, Jenny, and pick up some. I can certainly spare enough to get you going.”

  I looked at Jasper. He really was fond of my aunt. “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely. I don’t want to be responsible for keeping an artist from her work.” He wrote his address on a worn piece of paper he pulled from his pocket. “Come by anytime. I’m always there.” From what I’d heard, that was no exaggeration.

  “How about now?” I asked, truly inspired and anxious to get back to my wheel.

  “Sure. You can follow me.”

  “How far is it?” I asked, remembering that I had a teenage boy at home in my cottage. “I have groceries in the car and need to get them into the refrigerator.”

  “Only a few minutes. Maybe when you have more time you’ll stop by so I can give you a tour of my studio.”

  “I’d like that.” It was one studio I really did want to tour.

  I followed Jasper up island to his home and studio. I offered to pay him for the clay he brought me, but he wouldn’t hear of it. I thanked him profusely and he told me he’d look forward to seeing some of my work in the co-op.

  “If I’m accepted into the co-op,” I told him.

  “Don’t worry. You will be.”

  It was nice to have some fans, at least old friends of my aunt’s. I headed home, driving a little faster than usual. I just hoped Josh didn’t feel abandoned. Silly of me. After all, I’d rescued him from a desolate island where he’d run out of food and I’d brought him home to my cottage. And he did have sweet Rocky with him. Josh was the first one to point out that it was important that I carry on as usual so no one would suspect that I was hiding a teenage boy in my cottage.

  When I arrived home, Josh and Rocky were in the living room. Rocky was slumbering by the fireside, snoring softly. When he heard me, he came bounding over to greet me, eyes dancing, tail wagging, reminding me why I had wanted a dog. Josh was stretched out on the couch with a book in his hand, one he’d found on Winnie’s bookshelf most likely.

  He jumped up so quickly, unmasked fear in his eyes. Was he not allowed to lie on the couch at home? Or was it reading that his parents disapproved of?

  “It’s okay,” I told him. “Keep reading your book.”

  “Don’t you need help with the groceries?”

  “That would be nice.” I was pleased to see he had learned manners somewhere along the way, or at least appreciation.

  He peeked out the door before trotting down the porch steps to the car. One of these days I would learn more about the boy and his habits. And hopefully the reason for his need to be vigilant.

  Chapter 5

  Josh carried in three grocery bags to my one. He was a younger and shorter but equally buff version of my son Matthew. He helped me put away the food, careful to position everything in its correct place. As if asking me where things went was an imposition, he studied the cupboards and panty.

  “What’s this?” I asked, pulling some remnants of a faucet out of the kitchen trash.

  “Sorry, I should have asked if it was okay. I found a new faucet in the laundry room so I kinda changed out the old one.”

  “Yourself?”

  “Not rocket science.”

  “No, but some of us are handier than others.”

  There was a hint of a smile on his face. I wondered if I’d ever see a full-on smile.

  “Is there anything else that needs fixing around here?”

  “I’ll have to think about that.” Considering that it was a century-old house, I was certain there was plenty. “How old are you, Josh?”

  He hesitated. If he said too old, would I kick him out and let him fend for himself? If he said too young, would I feel an obligation to call social services? In the end, he told me what I believed was the truth.

  “Sixteen.”

  I put the kettle on and grabbed the cheese and french bread and a box of cookies that I’d bought at the store. “A snack?”

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  I set them on a platter anyway. He was, after all, a teenage boy, no doubt in the midst of a growth spurt. And he couldn’t fool me. He had gone hungry long enough to never turn down food that was in front of him, at least not for a very long time.

  I raised a single and very wise eyebrow. That was all it took for him to join me at the kitchen table.

  “Thank you,” he said politely. “You sure like tea, don’t you?”

  “I think I have to. My father’s from Scotland.”

  He nodded as though he understood. I had a feeling this boy wasn’t just handy. Judging from the books he had removed from Winnie’s shelf, including David Copperfield, he was intelligent enough to appreciate good literature. Now I just had to coax his story out of him.

  “It’s nice in here,” he said, looking around my country kitchen that had antique iron pots and pans hanging above the stove and a woodstove in the corner, lace curtains covering the windows but allowing in the sun when there was some. It was a cozy kitchen that smelled of apple-cranberry and cookie dough, both candles I lit often.

  “So, how did you end up on Aurora Island?”

  He shrugged. He wasn’t ready to open up yet.

  “Do you know who kept the dogs there?” Safe subject.

  “I don’t think they were kept there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He put down his hunk of bread and cheese that I had pushed closer and closer until he had accepted it. “They swam up onto the island.”

  “Swam? From where?”

  “I’m not sure. I think maybe they were on a boat. I heard one close to the island and then a while later three dogs showed up. I had to help them get up the hillside. They were real weak.”

  So maybe the vet was right. The gashes had come from an encounter with rocks. “And injured.”

  “Yeah,” Josh said. “They’d come across those jagged rocks before I got to them.”

  “Where did this boat dock? Or did it?”

  “I couldn’t tell if it went around to the other side of the island or if it went to another island. The islands are real close together there.”

  “Or kept going?”

  “I don’t think so. I heard them cut the engine so they must of stoppe
d at an island. Just don’t know which one.”

  “That’s all you saw or heard?” The detective’s instinct had kicked in.

  “Yeah. Like I said, I just heard a boat. Fortunately when the dogs fell overboard—or probably were thrown overboard—they weren’t too far from Aurora Island.”

  I looked under the kitchen table where Rocky was sitting on his haunches, ready to pounce if someone dropped a crumb. “Whoever their owners were, they sure didn’t take very good care of them. They were all underweight.” That was when it hit me. “Is that why you ran out of food before your friend came back with a new supply? You shared with the dogs?”

  Josh nodded. Still a man of few words, but he didn’t need to speak.He had just told me everything I needed to know about him.

  I let him enjoy the rest of his chocolate chip walnut cookie and tea before I asked anymore questions. These too were non-threatening ones.

  “Do you know anything about that compound on the island and the people who are involved with it?”

  “Not really. No one was there when I got there. That’s kinda why we chose that island. It looked kinda isolated and abandoned.”

  “But it wasn’t.”

  “No, but they only came a few times. They’d stay a couple days and then leave.”

  “Did they know you were there?”

  “No, they never found me.”

  “But you were scared of them.”

  He shrugged. “I wasn’t taking any chances.”

  “Do you know what they were doing?”

  “Not really. I just heard some machinery running. Couldn’t really tell anything from the sounds. It was just a bunch of grinding and drilling noises.”

  Which explained why they never went looking for the whimpering dogs. They didn’t hear them. Unless they didn’t care because they were the ones who had dumped them.

  “There must be a dock around the other side of the island because I could hear boats over there. Motor boats. Sounded big. Never saw them. I figure the machinery drowned out the dogs’ crying and whining. When they weren’t running it, I tried to keep them calm. I was lucky the dogs were only there for a couple days when the people came. When the people weren’t there, I let them cry all they wanted. It was kinda like they were crying for something or someone. Food probably.”

  And those cries had reached my friends and me and had led us to Three Dog Island and a boy. I wanted to ask him when he was going to tell me his story, but I tightened the leash on my curiosity and instead asked, “Did you miss the dogs once they were gone?”

  “You mean, after you and your friends rescued them?” He thought for a moment, looked at me for approval before picking up the chocolate macadamia nut cookie that I had slipped onto his plate. “Kind of.”

  “Just kind of?”

  “It was really hard listening to their cries and whimpers, you know? Even though they weren’t alone and I gave them some food—it wasn’t enough. They would just sit there and cry. Once one started, the other two joined in. But it was nice having them there too, kinda comforting. Especially when they’d stop crying.”

  I poured him another cup of my special blend of homemade blackberry and mint tea. He drank it down easily. He liked it. Or he was thirsty. Or maybe he was on his way to becoming a tea drinker.

  After our tea and snack, I showed Josh the portion of the garage that I had turned into a pottery studio.

  “Cool,” he said.

  “Want to try?”

  “Uh, that’s okay. Maybe I’ll watch though.”

  He watched me work at my wheel for close to an hour. Either he was very patient, earnestly fascinated with pottery, or wanted the company. Or was just being polite.

  “Come on, give it a try,” I said, pounding the vase that was not meant to be, back into a blob.

  He shrugged and sat down at the wheel. I talked him through it as he allowed the moist clay to slip through his fingers. If nothing else, pottery was definitely therapeutic.

  “I don’t think it’s my thing,” he said, letting the clay collapse on the wheel.

  “Hey, it took me years to make anything worth keeping.”

  “Years?”

  “Well, several months. But it’s fun, isn’t it?”

  “It’s okay.” I took that to mean he had really enjoyed himself.

  He washed up in the outside sink where I’d washed up before him.

  “I should get dinner started.”

  “Do you want help?” He needed to know that he was contributing. It would help him feel that he belonged here.

  I asked him to put on a fire and to feed Rocky, basic chores, but meaningful.

  It was after dinner while we were sitting by the fire, both of us reading—me a book by Wayne Dyer and Josh, more of David Copperfield—that I decided I needed an answer to at least one question. He was after all, staying in my home.

  “Josh, I hate to hound you, but there are some things I really do need to know.”

  He put down his book and cautiously looked up at me as though he were on trial and if he failed, he would be kicked out, banished to the island to fend for himself.

  “Why didn’t you want me to tell the deputy who was with me the first time I saw you that you were there?”

  His smile was tentative. “Don’t like law enforcement officers a whole lot?”

  “Because?”

  The familiar shrug. But this time he might just be gearing up to answer in words. His brown eyes shifted their focus from the blazing fire to my eyes, a slight shade lighter than his. His hair was the same light brown color as mine, but his sparkled with the energy of youth. He could have passed for my child, I thought. He was taller than my delicate dancer daughter but shorter than my son who was six feet tall. Josh was probably closer to five feet seven or eight which put him a couple inches taller than me. But he and Matthew did have a similar build. I wondered if he worked out as diligently as my son did.

  Josh interrupted my thoughts which were bordering on analysis. “Jenny?”

  “Yes?”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Of course.”

  He hesitated before speaking. “Why are you doing this?”

  It was my turn to shrug, definitely tempting. “I don’t really know. I suppose maybe it’s because I have a tendency to rescue things, people.” I glanced over at Rocky who stopped snoring for a moment to lift his head as if understanding my words. “And I think about my son, Matthew, and I know I would want someone to help him if he were in trouble.”

  “But you don’t know anything about me. I could be—”

  “A kid in trouble who needs help? Who’s been . . . betrayed in some way?”

  His sigh cut through me. He took a long sip of his tea. “How do you know that?”

  “Intuition.” And my heart chakra. I recognized in him what recently I had felt so deeply. I winced as the painful memories flooded back. I thought I’d be over it by now. Really, I knew better, but I thought I had done more healing than I apparently had.

  I didn’t think about Joe that often anymore. I didn’t dwell on what had happened. I no longer threw ice at a rock wall on a daily basis as I had done initially. But the anger was still there. I stared into the fire as though it could burn through my anger and melt it away.

  It wasn’t just a physical betrayal, an affair. That would have been easier to heal. He had betrayed the privacy and intimacy that comes from the deepest bond that defines marriage. Had he divulged my secrets, my vulnerabilities, fears, passions? Did this woman who was scarcely more than a stranger to me, know things my husband thought about me of which even I was not aware? Had she replaced me as the witness of his life? Did she know secrets about him—his thoughts, his pain, his passion—that I did not know?

  I had to assume yes. I had to assume that his lover knew things about my husband and my marriage that I did not know. It would be a long time before I recovered from that kind of betrayal.

  “Jenny?”

 
I looked up at Josh.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay. I was just thinking about—”

  “Betrayal?”

  “Yes. Would you like to share yours with me?” I could not begin to imagine the depth of his. He was a child. He had trusted. Someone had betrayed that trust. He was quiet for a few minutes. I held a safe place for him with my silence. After a few false starts, he finally spoke. He was not a story teller. He was more comfortable with yes and no questions that he could answer with a single word or a shrug.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Just outside of Portland.”

  “Who are you running from?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  I waited. He didn’t offer more. Josh definitely broke Charlie’s rule that when there’s a void, the person you’re questioning will fill it.

  “Who do you think?”

  “A friend of my step father’s.” He sighed and leaned back on the couch. If I was reading him correctly, he was realizing that he needed to trust someone, and who better than the person who had trusted him enough to rescue him? But he had just been betrayed. How do you trust after that? I held my breath.

  “I think he thinks I overheard something. About something they did.”

  “Something, as in committing a crime?”

  “Yeah, maybe. He and—”

  “Your mother and step father?”

  “Not my mother, but yeah. Only I don’t know what they’ve been doing. I was there with them, hanging around the house and stuff, but I really don’t know what’s been going on. I think it’s been going on for a while, but for some reason he thinks I’m gonna squeal now. Like suddenly he doesn’t want me out of his sight, you know? I’m not sure what happened but my mother woke me up in the middle of the night, handed me some money, and told me to get out of there as fast as I could. So I threw some stuff into my duffle bag and headed out.”

  “How—?”

  “I hitched a ride to the bus station and headed for Salem where I have a cousin. I stayed there for a few days, but then someone was following me.”

  “You saw them?”

  “Just the uniform.”

  “A cop?” My forehead wrinkled and I felt the beginning of a headache. This wasn’t making a lot of sense.