Heroes Are My Weakness(38)

Both the gash in Annie’s calf and the cut in Theo’s forehead needed stitches, but there was no doctor on the island and simple bandages had to do. This left each of them with a permanent scar—Theo’s small, almost rakish, Annie’s longer but eventually fading more than the memory ever could.

Later that night, after the puppies were resettled in the stable with their mother and everyone had gone to bed, Annie was still awake, listening to the faintest sound of voices coming from the adults’ bedroom. They were speaking too softly for her to hear, so she crept out into the hallway to eavesdrop.

“Face facts, Elliott,” she heard her mother say. “There’s something seriously wrong with your son. A normal kid doesn’t do things like this.”

“He needs discipline, that’s all,” Elliott had retorted. “I’m finding a military school for him. No more coddling.”

Her mother didn’t relent. “He doesn’t need a military school. He needs a psychiatrist!”

“Stop exaggerating. You always exaggerate, and I hate it.”

The argument gathered steam, and Annie cried herself to sleep.


THEO GAZED DOWN FROM THE turret. Annie stood on the beach, the ends of her hair whipping from beneath her red knit cap as she stared toward the cave. A rockslide a few years ago had blocked the entrance, but she still knew exactly where it was. He rubbed the thin white scar on his eyebrow.

He’d sworn to his father that he hadn’t meant to hurt anyone—that he’d only taken the pups to the beach that afternoon so he and Annie could play with them, but that he’d started watching TV and forgotten about them.

The military school he was then sent to was committed to reforming troubled boys, and his classmates survived the austerity by tormenting one another. His solitary nature, preoccupation with books, and status as a newcomer made him a target. He was forced into fights. Most of them he won, but not all. He didn’t much care either way. Regan, however, did, and she staged a hunger strike.

Her boarding school was the sister institution of his former school, and she wanted Theo back. At first Elliott had ignored her hunger strike, but when the school threatened to send her home for anorexia, he’d relented. Theo had gone back to his old school.

He turned away from the turret window and packed up his laptop along with a couple of yellow legal pads he was taking to the cottage. He’d never liked to write in an office. In Manhattan, he’d traded his home office for a library cubicle or a table at one of his favorite coffee shops. If Kenley was at work, he’d move to the kitchen or an easy chair in the living room. Kenley had never been able to understand it.

You’d be a lot more productive, Theo, if you’d stay in one spot.

Ironic words from a woman whose emotions could race from manic highs to paralyzing lows in the span of a day.

He wasn’t going to let Kenley haunt him today. Not after having his first restful sleep since he’d come to Peregrine Island. He had a career to rescue, and today he was going to write.

The Sanitarium had been an unexpected blockbuster, a circumstance that hadn’t impressed his father. “It’s a bit difficult to explain to our friends why my son has such a grisly imagination. If it weren’t for your grandmother’s foolishness, you’d be working at the company, where you belong.”

His grandmother’s foolishness, as Elliott called it, was her decision to leave her estate to Theo, and, in his father’s estimation, take away Theo’s need to have a real occupation. In other words, go to work for Harp Industries.

The company had its roots in Elliott’s grandfather’s button manufacturing business but now made the titanium pins and bolts built of super alloys that helped hold together Black Hawk helicopters and stealth bombers. But Theo didn’t want to make pins and bolts. He wanted to write books where the boundaries between good and evil were blazingly clear. Where there was at least a chance that order would win out over chaos and madness. That’s what he’d done in The Sanitarium, his horror novel about a sinister mental hospital for the criminally insane with a room that transported its residents, including Dr. Quentin Pierce, a particularly sadistic serial killer, back through time.

Now he was working on the sequel to The Sanitarium. With the background already established from the first book and his intention to send Pierce back to nineteenth-century London, his task should have been easier. But he was having trouble, and he wasn’t sure why. He did know he’d have a better chance of breaking through his block at the cottage, and he was glad he’d been able to bully Annie into letting him work there.

Something rubbed against his ankles. He looked down to see that Hannibal had brought him a gift. A limp gray mouse carcass. He grimaced. “I know you’re doing it out of love, pal, but would you mind knocking it off?”

Hannibal purred and scratched his chin against Theo’s leg.

“Another day, another corpse,” Theo muttered. It was time to get to work.





Chapter Nine


THEO HAD LEFT HIS RANGE Rover for her at Harp House. Driving it over the treacherous road into town to meet the weekly supply boat should have been a lot more relaxing than driving her Kia, but she was too wound up from waking that morning and finding Theo sleeping next to her. She parked the car at the wharf and cheered herself up thinking about the real salad she’d fix herself for dinner.