“You better hope I don’t. Connie says this is no place to bring a young person.” But then on impulse she clutched my hand, an assuring squeeze and drop. “Okay,” she said softly. “I won’t tell.” Then her voice lowered to a whisper. “Don’t let her talk to me. She’s a witch, Jamie. That’s why she’s locked up here. You can see how wrong she is just by her eyes, how they twitch all around.”
“You don’t even have to look at her, and I definitely won’t ask you to talk to her.” My mind reeled. But I couldn’t stop now, I was so close, I had to keep chasing it. Whatever her mental state, Katherine Quint had seen Peter right at the end. She had to have noticed something, witnessed something.
In the main entrance of rubbery palms, its floor-through carpet vast and beige as a desert, I stopped at a security desk, where I showed my driver’s license and got directions that landed us two floors up, at a half-moon-shaped nurses’ station.
“I’m here to see Katherine Quint,” I said to a nurse whose face was dominated by an intense pair of black-framed glasses. “I’m a family friend.”
She entered the name and shook her head, displeased. “You’re not on my log.”
I steeled her in my eye, giving her my best Jessie. “I’ve visited a couple of times before, last year,” I pressed. “Or maybe you recognize her?” As I pointed out Isa, who was aimlessly jiggling the knob of a vending machine down by the elevators.
The nurse looked from me to Isa and back again. Her stare softened. “You do look familiar. So does that pretty little girl. What are your names?”
“Isa McRae.” I went for it. “And Jessie Feathering.”
She nodded. “Yes, that’s right. Good to see you again. One minute.” She pulled on her cardigan and left her station, crossing to use a red wall phone on the other side of the room. It seemed like a lifetime of waiting until she nodded.
“Go on up,” she said. “Katherine says she knows you both. You’ll meet in the common room. Once I buzz you through, it’s down the hall to the second sign-in desk.”
We walked through. Isa dragging, me terrified but brisk.
Although I’d never seen her before, I recognized Katherine Quint immediately. She had Pete’s broadly sloped shoulders and pale eyes, only hers were watery and watched me from under half-mast, crepe-y lids. Motionless in her armchair, one of the few stray pieces of furniture in the bare-bones recreation room, empty save one old man dozing in his wheelchair by the window, she did not appear at all surprised to see me. Cautiously, I came to stand a few feet away from her, nearer to the ladder-back chair that she did not invite me to sit in.
Isa held back.
“You brought the girl,” she said. Her voice was reedy and childish; it didn’t seem to have aged along with the rest of her. “That wasn’t your best idea, Jessie. She’s a very susceptible child. High-strung, I remember, when the three of them came to visit.”
“I had to take her. I’m her babysitter. I couldn’t just leave her. And she helped me—she was a way in.”
“Now all you’ll need to do is figure a way to get out.” The way Katherine said this was excessively hammy and theatrical, like a character in one of those early Hitchcock movies from the 1940s. If she meant it to be amusing, it only emphasized that she seemed off-key and off-kilter, a person sealed from modern technologies and preoccupations.
But I smiled, tight-lipped, anyway. It was not as if she could help living here. We studied each other, trying to make sense of the other’s presence round and round the cobbler’s bench a monkey chased a weasel the monkey thought t’was all in fun
“Hi, Mrs. Quint,” said Isa, approaching to halt briefly at my side, just long enough to make a performance of touching her nose before she veered off to sort through a pile of old magazines strewn over a coffee table.
“So she’s your ward now,” said Katherine. “But you’re not from the island, are you?”
“No, my name’s Jamie Atkinson. I’m not from around here, but I’m living at Skylark this summer. I have Jessie’s job, taking care of Isa.”
Katherine Quint nodded, a tug of her head. Nothing in her face seemed to care anything about who I was or why I’d come here. “Then you were a summer friend of Peter’s?” Her eyes twitched and blinked, reminding me of an old movie strip, and I understood what Isa had meant, that Katherine’s “wrongness” was immediately apparent just from looking at her, from being seen by her. “He never mentioned you.”
“This is my first summer on Little Bly. I never met him. Or Jessie. I’ve really got nothing to do with Bly.”
“Nothing and everything.” She sniffed but she’d grown rigid, and as her fingers began to twist up a tatty blanket across her lap, I sensed that my presence disturbed her. “And if you didn’t know my son, then why are you standing in front of me?”
“Because he sent me,” I said, with such calm it was as if I’d planned to say it all along to give her a fright or something, though I hadn’t, not at all, and my own words hit me with the same atomic force that I saw in Katherine Quint’s reaction.
It pulled down her guard. She straightened herself upright, but then just as quickly crumpled back in the chair, as if she’d lost her strength. But her energy had changed. Her eyes blinked around the room the crazy people can always see clear down to the ugliest truth. Problem is, nobody believes ’em.
“Who are you to me?” she asked. “Why should I speak to you?”
“I’m nobody. I came here because I need …” All you need’s a little proof. “I need to be released from this burden, this weight that Peter’s presence has put on me.”
She was shifting in her seat, unwilling, angry, but I sensed that she knew exactly what I was telling her.
“So I came to find you, to see if there was anything you knew about Pete’s last visit. It’s not something I wanted. This history, Peter and Jessie, everything that happened last summer—I inherited it, in a way. I didn’t choose it.”
“What’s choice got to do with anything?” snapped Katherine, blinking, shifting, and then it was almost a full minute before she decided to speak to me again. In the intervening silence, I could hear Isa, across the room, flipping through magazines and probably listening in. “Last time I saw my boy, he came alone, in that fancy car.” Katherine’s voice had gone flat as she relayed this information. “Same one you drove in, like he was the prince of Bly. He came for the ring to give her. The one his father’d given me, and his father him. I couldn’t. Not at the time. I just couldn’t. A mother knows.”