Page 58 of Light of Day
Luke dabbed it off with a napkin, which he added to a small pile of similarly stained napkins on the table. “That’s why we have to get a double scoop,” he said dryly. “Half of the ice cream ends up on a napkin.”
“I get it. You know how dogs like to roll around in anything that smells good to them? I always thought that for me, that would be ice cream.”
Izzy found that image hilarious and laughed so hard that she nearly toppled the upper scoop of her cone. Luke rescued it with one quick move and plopped it back on her cone. The little girl found that funny too, but this time she managed to laugh without threatening her dessert.
Heather found herself smiling more than she had in quite some time. Kids could always do that, couldn’t they? Without even trying, they made you change your perspective on things. The cascade of disasters that had come her way lately—dumped by Tim, show canceled, Gabby missing, father lost to the four winds—it all faded away as she soaked in Izzy’s infectious laughter.
It wasn’t until another child appeared, someone from Izzy’s school, that Luke and Heather were able to confer.
“Something happened to Andy,” he said in a low voice.
“Yes, I heard. I wish I’d gone easier on him. I was so focused on not letting our only connection to Gabby get away…” She shook her head. “I should have been more careful.” Luke had warned her, after all.
“I have a feeling it had been building up, but I’m going to talk to his parents as soon as we’re done here.”
“Good idea.” Heather nodded in agreement. “Can I come too?”
“What the hell, why not? We have one night until the Harbortown police take over. After that, probably not.”
Heather dug a spoon into her cup of Raspberry Moose Tracks with coconut flakes on top. She could have seen that coming. Of course she wouldn’t be welcome in an official murder investigation.
But the Harbortown police couldn’t stop her from pursuing the story that Gabby had been working on. “I found out something interesting from my mother.”
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Oh yeah?”
“She mentioned the other day that my great-great-grandfather was the only doctor on the island in his time. But she didn’t know what kind of doctor, so she asked a few of the oldsters who hang out at the Bloodshot Eyeball if they’d ever heard anything. One of them did. Carleton Grant.”
“He’s over ninety, right?”
“Yes. He remembered hearing about my great-great-grandfather, even though he died in like, nineteen-twenty, before Carleton was even born. Apparently, get this, Hennessy McPhee—that was his name—was a name used to scare little kids into obeying their parents. They’d say, ‘if you don’t behave yourself, Hennessy will come and take you away.’ The memory of him was so powerful that parents kept saying it even after Hennessy was dead. The legend lived on, like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster.”
Luke was listening to her, looking just as fascinated as she’d been when her mother related the story.
“But why? Why would a doctor be so scary?”
“Well, apparently he specialized in mental disorders. If he diagnosed someone with a mental disability, they could get sent to the School for the Feeble-Minded. Remember what Jimmy Simms said, that his mother threatened him with that?”
The shock on Luke’s face mirrored her own when she’d heard that detail. “Jesus. So did that happen a lot, that people got sent there?”
“It shouldn’t have. I mean, on an island this size, how many mentally challenged people could there be? Don’t answer that,” she said quickly, as a joke. “But it sounds like it must have. Here’s the other thing. Carleton was born in nineteen thirty-two. That was twenty years after the hotel was built, right? They started it in nineteen-twelve. Hennessy died in nineteen-twenty. So how would Hennessy make that big of an impression on the islanders in such a short time? Eight years? Carleton said he heard people telling those scare stories up until our generation was born. The School for the Feeble-Minded changed names a few times, and was permanently closed in nineteen-ninety-six. But up until then, people were still holding up Hennessy as some kind of specter of fear.”
She watched him put all that together and sift through the possibilities. “So you think he must have been here before nineteen-twelve.”
“That’s my theory. Think about it. In nineteen-twelve, supposedly, laborers arrive on an uninhabited island to build the hotel. Hennessy comes too, maybe so they had a doctor around. But he diagnoses so many of these hard-working laborers with mental disabilities that he becomes a figure of fear to their descendants? That doesn’t add up.”
He nodded as he toyed with the last bit of his cone. “It doesn’t. Why would my ancestor hire a bunch of people with mental disabilities? Unless the island drove them mad after they got here,” he added with a little laugh.
“This place? Nah.” She grinned. “Maybe their working conditions were so dismal they went crazy.”
“Oh, so now it’s my ancestor’s fault.”
“Own it, Carmichael,” she teased. “Your ancestor was the big cheese. Mine was a mere doctor.”
He shook his head as he thought about it further. “None of these scenarios works. If a worker wasn’t effective, he’d be fired, not committed.”
“Exactly.”
“So people were living here before the hotel was built. That’s your conclusion.”
