Read Online Marrow Island by Alexis M. Smith - Free Book Online Page A

till morning. It was an unnerving scene, but so were lots of odd scenes in strangers’ homes—I had no context. Maybe an emergency called him away from his packing? Did I really want to explain to a sheriff’s deputy why, in the middle of the night, I had snuck into the house of a man I’d never met? I could hear her typing.
    “All right, ma’am. Looks like there’s a deputy who can come out.” She took down my name and address.
    I had toast and coffee and listened to the radio while I waited. After a while, I heard the wheels of a car coming down the lane and pulling in the drive behind my car. Chris Lelehalt stepped out.
    “Shit,” I said. I took a breath and met him at the door.
    He nodded at me. “Hi there, ma’am.” He pulled a notebook from his pocket and read, then looked up again. “Lucie Bowen?”
    “That’s me.” He didn’t seem to remember me. He nodded again and looked over his notes, then half turned and looked over his shoulder toward Rookwood. He was a handsome guy—clean-shaven, so you could see his features—broad-nosed, dark-eyed, high cheekbones. He looked like he drank plenty of beer and probably had been doing so since he was fourteen, like a lot of the kids on the islands, but he still looked like the boy I had known, too. He looked back at me.
    “You’ve gotten older,” he said.
    “You, too.”
    He shrugged.
    “Actually, I wouldn’t have recognized you, but Marla Sharpe told me you were back to check on the place.” He indicated the cottage.
    “Ah.” I nodded. “She’s the lady with the low-down on Orwell, I guess.”
    He smiled. “She means well. The old-timers, you know. They keep track.”
    I let him inside and offered him coffee, but he declined. It was almost ten o’clock. He was working a split shift; another deputy was on maternity leave. So I walked him across the road to Rookwood. On the way he asked me questions about when I arrived on the island, how long I was staying, how my mom was doing. I couldn’t tell if this was an official interrogation or just small talk.
    When we reached the door, he raised his hand to knock, then stopped himself and asked, “Why did you go in, again?”
    I explained about the light, about not seeing any sign of Jacob Swenson all day. I played up the family connection: my grandparents had been caretakers of Rookwood; I had run in and out freely as a child. He seemed satisfied with this answer and knocked hard, opened the door, calling inside.
    “Mr. Swenson, it’s the Sheriff’s Department.”
    The second visit went more or less as the first visit had gone, except that we turned on the lights. I led Chris on the route I had taken up the staircase, along the hall, and to the bedroom where the lamps were still lit. Chris looked over everything in the room, then he asked me to stand in the front entry while he looked over the rest of the house. It was a large house and I stood there for twenty minutes, listening to his footsteps, doors opening and closing. He had stopped calling out Jacob’s name.
    When he came back through the entry, turning off lights behind him, he said, “He’s not here.”
    We walked back to my cottage.
    “Does it look suspicious to you?” I asked.
    “I can’t say,” he said. “But I’ll make some calls tomorrow and try to track him down. We’ll come back over if we need to.”
    I wasn’t satisfied, but I knew I wouldn’t get a better answer. Even small-town police were tight-lipped about investigations.
     
    I spent the next day at the coffee shop on Anchorage Street with my laptop, looking for information on Jacob Swenson. I found out more about the Swenson Trust, Maura’s foundation. She had donated land all over the San Juan Islands to the state and county for parks, for wildlife conservation. The foundation still held private acreage on several islands, including Marrow and Orwell, which could be accessed for study with a letter of interest. The address listed was a PO box in Orwell Village.