Peter May - Entry Island

But Sime wanted to be on the plane with Kirsty when it flew out at midday. Tonight would be his last chance to take another look at the house, and to go through the family papers stored in the basement. Besides which, he knew that sleep would probably escape him, and he would be unable to contain himself during the long waking hours of darkness. ‘How much will it take?’ is all he said.

‘How much are you offering?’

Sime’s opening gambit of two hundred dollars drew a laugh from the fisherman. ‘Take away the cost of the fuel and there’s bugger all left for me,’ he said. ‘Five hundred.’

‘Done.’ Sime would have paid double. And something about the speed with which he agreed conveyed that to Boudreau. The fisherman pulled a face, realising he could have negotiated more.

‘Give me a minute.’

Boudreau stepped inside his wheelhouse and slid the door shut. Sime could see him inside making a call on his cellphone. He had an exchange with someone at the other end that lasted around thirty seconds, then he hung up and slipped the phone back in his pocket. He slid open the door.

‘Okay, we’ve got the green light. Let’s get going.’

He turned back inside to start the motor and Sime followed him in. ‘Who were you phoning?’

‘The owner, of course.’

‘Oh, I thought you owned the boat yourself.’

‘Hah!’ Boudreau smiled wryly. ‘I wish.’

‘Who’s the owner, then?’

GPS and sonar monitors flickered into life. ‘Mayor Briand.’

Within fifteen minutes of leaving the harbour, any thoughts that Sime might have had about Briand had deserted him. The commanding sensation of seasickness drove everything from his mind, and by the time they were halfway across the bay he was regretting his foolishness in making the crossing at all.

Boudreau himself stood easily at the wheel, legs apart, somehow moving in time with the boat. Sime took comfort from the fact that he seemed so relaxed. The light was fading fast, the sky ominously black overhead. It wasn’t until they were close to Entry Island that he actually saw it, emerging out of the spray and spume to take dark shape and fill their eyes.

The sea was less turbulent in the lee of the island, and they motored easily into the comparative calm of the little harbour as the sea vented its wrath against the concrete breakwaters that protected it.

Boudreau eased his vessel up to the quayside with all the skill of a practised boatman and leaped out to secure it with a rope. He took Sime’s hand to steady him as he jumped across the gap between heaving boat and dry land. He grinned happily. ‘You want me to stay and take you back?’ he shouted above the howl of the wind.

‘Good God no, man,’ Sime shouted back at him. ‘Get home before the storm breaks. I’ll take the ferry back in the morning.’

It was only when Boudreau was gone, the lights of his fishing boat devoured by darkness, that Sime was able to take stock for the first time. His entire focus had been on getting here, and now that he was, a flood of emotions drowned all coherent thought. He had forced himself not to think about what Aitkens had told him until this moment, almost afraid to face the implications of what he now knew.

Kirsty Cowell was the great-great-great-granddaughter of Kirsty Guthrie, who had come looking for her Simon and ended up shipwrecked here on this tiny island in the middle of the Gulf of St Lawrence. And she had waited, and waited. Because he had promised, no matter where she was, he would find her. But he never did. And in the end she had married another, as he had. And all that had survived both the time and the generations in between were the ring that she had given his ancestor and the pendant she had kept for herself.

The rain whipped into Sime’s face as he stood on the quayside trying to come to terms with the bizarre quirk of fate that had somehow brought him and Kirsty Cowell together.

A group of fisherman securing boats against the storm had stopped what they were doing and gathered now in a knot to stand and watch him from a distance. Aware of them suddenly, Sime became self-conscious and turned to hurry away through the rain-streaked pools of light that lay all along the length of the harbour. A lamp burning in the wheelhouse of the last of the fishing boats caught his eye. A figure stepped out into the stern of the boat as he passed. The face turned towards him and was momentarily caught in the light. A face he knew at once. Owen Clarke. Sime pulled his hood up over his head and lowered it into the wind as he hurried away, following the road up to Main Street.

The thrum of the generators at the top of the road was barely audible above the roar of the wind that he fought against all the way up the hill until he reached the church. A couple of pickups passed him on the road, bumping and lurching through the puddles. Headlights picking him out against the black of the night, then passing with the growl of an engine to be swallowed by the dark. Lights shone in the windows of the few houses dotted around the hillside, but there was not a soul in sight. Sime opened the gate of the church and by the light of his cellphone found his way back to the grave of Kirsty McKay, whom he now knew to be Kirsty Guthrie.

He stood in the wind and rain looking down at her headstone, knowing that her bones lay beneath his feet.

Just as he had done that morning, Sime knelt in front of the stone and laid both hands upon it. The wet of the earth soaked into the knees of his trousers. The stone felt cold and rough in his hands. And he had a powerful sense of somehow bridging the gap between these ill-fated lovers, bringing them together at last after all these years.

He felt, too, a strong sense of grief. He had lived through passionate moments in the skin of his ancestor. In his dream he had sacrificed everything to try to be with his Ciorstaidh. And here she lay, dead in the earth, as she had done for a very, very long time. He stood up quickly.

Impossible, he knew, to tell tears from rain.

The hoarse revving of a motor reached him above the howl of the wind, and he turned in time to see the shadow of a figure on a quad bike vanishing over the lip of the hill.

By the time he got to the big yellow house on the cliffs it was pitch-dark. He had struggled all the way against the wind, stumbling through the potholes that pitted the road. His clothes were soaked through and he was shivering from the cold.

But he did not go in straight away. He circled the big house and crossed the grass to the summerhouse, the house which had originally belonged to the McKays. The house where Kirsty Guthrie had grown up and in all probability later lived with her husband. The house where, several generations later, Kirsty Cowell had been born and raised. Walking in the footsteps of her ancestor, seeing all the same things that she had seen. Entry Island, almost unchanged in two hundred years. The sun coruscating across the bay towards the other islands of the archipelago stretched out along the horizon. She would have felt the same wind in her face, picked the same flowers from the same hills.

The front door was not locked, and Sime let himself in. He switched on a table lamp and wandered around in the half-dark just touching things. Things that belonged to Kirsty Cowell. An ornamental owl sculpted out of a piece of coal, an old clock that ticked slowly on the mantel. A book she had been reading, laid aside on a coffee table. A mug of tea never returned to the kitchen. And with every touch, the connection between them seemed to grow stronger until he could hardly bear it.

He pushed through the screen door and back out onto the porch, and ran across to the house that James Cowell had built. The last shredded remnants of crime scene tape clung to a wooden stake, fluttering wildly in the wind. The door to the conservatory was not locked and he slid it open to step inside and fumble for a light switch.