Rebel Island (Tres Navarre #7)(53)

“This is my room.”

I might’ve blushed. I hadn’t even noticed the dresses hanging up in the closet, the makeup kit on the bathroom sink. The door had been open, the room soaked with rain like all the others. I’d just walked right in. The past night in the hotel had eroded my sense of private property.

“Sorry,” I murmured.

“It’s okay.” She came to the window and looked out.

The sky was getting incrementally brighter. I still couldn’t see the sun, but there was a yellow quality to the gray, like butter in oatmeal.

Lane looked healthier in the light. The wrinkles around her eyes might’ve been from smiling rather than weariness. Her blond hair had a silky sheen.

“When will the ferry come?” she asked.

“It’s more likely the Coast Guard will get here first. They’ll have some fast boats riding out the storm.”

She strained her eyes toward the horizon, as if trying to imagine such a boat. I could relate. After last night, the idea of rescue—the notion that anything could exist beyond Rebel Island—seemed as fantastic as pink elephants.

“My ex-husband was never here,” she said softly. “I owe you an apology.”

Out in the ocean, something surfaced—a gleaming white arc of fiberglass, the bottom of a capsized boat—and sank again instantly beneath the waves.

“Why did you run from him?” I asked.

“He murdered a man.”

“Who?”

Lane hugged her arms. “I don’t even know his name. Isn’t that terrible? He was…a migrant worker. Bobby and I lived near the train tracks outside Uvalde. One afternoon in March, while Bobby was at work, this man knocked on the kitchen door. He asked me for a drink of water. I shouldn’t have let him in.”

“You let a stranger into your home?”

“He was thirsty and hungry. He was about to collapse. I didn’t see why not.”

I could think of a lot of reasons. A young woman alone in the country, letting a strange man into her house. But the way she said it made it sound like the most reasonable thing in the world.

“I was alone most days,” she told me. “It was hot. I had the kitchen window open and I was slicing apples. The whole house smelled like wheat from the fields. The man who came to the door…he had dark skin. He wore an old denim shirt, beige pants. His tennis shoes were worn through. He spoke good English. He said he’d hitched a train all the way from Piedras Negras. He had a wife and four children. He wanted to find work so he could send them money.”

I pictured the scene—Lane at one end of the kitchen table, listening to the immigrant’s story. It wasn’t hard to see why the man had opened up to her. When she wasn’t terrified, her face was kind and open.

“He ate a turkey sandwich and some apple slices and a glass of milk,” she remembered. “Then Bobby got home.”

She fell into a kind of trance as she told the rest of her story. It was as if she’d practiced it in front of the mirror many times, trying to make herself understand.

Bobby never came home before dark, she said. But that day he did. He’d had an argument with his foreman and walked off the job. He stopped at a store in Uvalde, bought a six-pack of beer and downed three of them in the truck on the way home.

When he found the Mexican sitting at his kitchen table, he turned on Lane. He struck her across the face, called her a whore. The Mexican man rose and told Bobby to stop.

Bobby grabbed a kitchen knife, the same one Lane had been using to slice apples, and the Mexican man lifted his hands as if that would stop the blade.

Hours later, after dark and a lot more alcohol, Bobby buried the Mexican. He forced Lane to help. They dragged the body to a creek bed behind their rented property and spent hours digging a hole in the wet black earth. Afterward, he told Lane he had only been protecting her. He drove the point home with a good beating. He’d only done what he had to do, killing that Mexican. If she told anyone, he would kill her. Lane had no doubt he meant it.

Three months later, she finally got up the nerve to run.

“I knew he’d never let me go,” she told me. “He’s still looking for me.”

“Go to the police.”

She shook her head. “They’d put me in prison, too. I’ve stayed silent for months. I helped him hide the body. If I just hadn’t let that poor man inside, or if I’d told him to leave a little sooner—”

“What Bobby did wasn’t your fault.”

She brushed the rain off her face. “I told Garrett all this. I told him he shouldn’t get involved with me.”

I didn’t answer.

“I like him,” Lane admitted. “I don’t know what to do. He’s the kindest man I’ve ever met.”

“You need to get out more.”

She pursed her lips. “I understand you don’t approve. You don’t want him to get hurt.”

That stunned me. I’d been so worried about Garrett taking advantage of Lane, I’d never thought about Garrett getting hurt. But as Lane said it, I realized she was right. I didn’t want my brother falling for anyone. I’d seen him do that before. His depression when he was dumped—and he was always dumped—was terrible and dangerous.

And yet, looking at Lane, I felt like some chances might be worth taking, even if they were dangerous. Maybe it was the right thing to unlatch your screen door for a stranger once in a while, let them inside for apple slices and milk.