Booth Island

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It’s been nine years since Boothe Treader summered at her family’s island. Twelve since her brother died on its rocky shore. She’s never forgiven him for abandoning her, her parents for divorcing, or the dark-eyed boy who watched him drown. The stranger, the killer, no punishment that let him live could ever be enough. So, she wished him dead each passing day.

Now her dead brother is beckoning her to his gravesite. Her mother has deeded her the island. And old friends are lining up to welcome her back—or are they?

My clothed body bumps off granite rocks as it descends into the frigid depths of a Canadian lake. A swirl of red drifts on the bubbles escaping  my lips. I watch each pocket of air grow smaller as it ascends toward the surface. A concussion rams my hip against a cement post. I glance to my left. Another  body bobs next to mine.  Recognizing it, I reach out…

I woke with a jolt knowing I was out of my depth again. I chose to believe that was the message of the dream. The nightmare, really, had haunted me at random intervals since my brother, Roy, drowned at  the age of seventeen. I was fifteen at the time. We had been a team.

“A mystery rich with unease…”
—Booklife

My clothed body bumps off granite rocks as it descends into the frigid depths of a Canadian lake. A swirl of red drifts on the bubbles escaping my lips. I watch each pocket of air grow smaller as it ascends toward the surface. A concussion rams my hip against a cement post. I glance to my left. Another body bobs next to mine. Recognizing it, I reach out…

I woke with a jolt knowing I was out of my depth again. I chose to believe that was the message of the dream. The nightmare, really, had haunted me at random intervals since my brother, Roy, drowned at the age of seventeen. I was fifteen at the time. We had been a team.

Roy died on Booth Island. Our family-owned island sits in a long bay that hooks off one of the largest inland lakes in the Canadian province of Ontario. Booth Island divides the long, cove cluttered body of water into Upper Bay and Lower Bay. The quarter-mile passage to the east of the island is charted as Lapp Strait. The much narrower channel to the west is Beaver Course, inhabited by its own industrious beaver. The beaver lives on the banks of Booth Island in a tidy lodge built of sticks, chinked with mud, and anchored to the steep rocky shore.

On occasion, the wind drives the waters down the three-mile reaches of Upper Bay with such ferocity that as the bumptious water passes through the two channels, Booth Island appears to steam into Lower Bay like an ocean liner. When we were still a family, we would run en masse to a wooden jetty at New Landing on the north of the island and hold hands as though we were on the deck of a passenger ship. Say the RMS Lusitania. Torpedoed like our family.

My smartphone chirped its distinctive ring from the nightstand next to my bed. The photo card I had received yesterday rested against my clock. My eyes locked on the image of my brother, forever young, leaning on the railing of the deck my mother had built after his death and christened Roy’s Deck. I robo-answered my phone, knowing Roy’s photo had sparked my dream.

“Boothe Treader speaking.” My mom added the e to her surname, Booth, to make my given name feminine. Dad called me Baby Girl until I was twelve. My brother, Roy, called me BG to annoy me, now my dad does it for the same reason. Everyone else calls me Boo, like the note inside the photo card, scrawled in my brother’s distinctive hand: Boo!

The card had been sent from a photo service in California. The return address printed in the left corner read: Roy Treader, Booth Island, Ontario, Canada. It was true he resided there under a handmade marker of cement with words etched in it by my father.

“Hey, Boo, Penny Withers, here.” As though I knew more than one shiny Penny. “I know it’s early,” she rattled on, “I know you’re due to arrive the day after tomorrow, but…” How could Penny sound so upbeat at 7:30 in the morning? How could anyone?

A tussle ensued as the phone changed hands. I was fully awake by the time the tug of war ended, my antenna twanging. Something was up. I fingered my brother’s face, knowing the photo had been shopped like the others received over the past five years. The boy who killed my brother had been a photographer or played at it. Punished for his bit of malicious mischief by forced enlistment in the U.S. Marines. For all I knew, he was dead. And even if he wasn’t, why torture me with these cards? I had nothing to do with his guilty plea or sentence. Besides, photo postcards seemed more like something Roy would do for laughs, thinking it was all a great joke via the astral plane. If so, it was nice that Roy was still enjoying himself.

“Ms. Treader? This is Joe, Joe Withers. Penny and I thought you should know that the OPP, sorry, Ontario Provincial Police are on Booth Island. A body got hung up on the palette at Old Landing last night. Tim O’Dell found it at dawn when he brought the generator around for you.” Tim O’Dell managed Booth Island year-round. I had spoken to him a few days ago, letting him know I would be summering over.

“Who?” I croaked, sitting on the edge of the bed, my feet dangling like I was fifteen again, my stomach hollow with fear. This edgy pain in my gut was why it had taken me so long to face my brother, though the psychiatrist my mother paid had been urging me for years, babbling on about closure. I dropped the shrink, instead.

A day later, the first photo card arrived. From that day on, a postcard appeared on June 1st of the last five years. Always of Roy, always alive. I held them dear, telling no one I had received them, including my parents. Why would I? They were addressed to me, and my mother already thought I was nuts.

I am not. At least, I think not.

“We had a bad storm on the lake last night.” Joe said, “So far, no one has raised a hue and cry about a missing person, suggesting the body might be someone from Upper Bay. Whoever he is, he will be missed sooner than later, then someone will report it to the OPP.”

“What do you need from me?” I stood, walked to my bedroom window, Roy’s photo in hand, and gazed out over the Gettysburg battlefield, sloping lawns, ancient trees, deep green, and still. My mother’s family had been here during the battle, and we remained.

“Nothing, Penny thought you should know since you’re all but on your way. No need to make any sort of heroic effort to arrive early. Unless…”

Off phone, Penny hissed, “For heaven’s sake, Joe! Just stop.” A brief scuffle, then Penny’s voice. “Men! It is a male in his twenties, late twenties. That’s all we know.”

Penny and I had been friends since she waddled up to me at two years old and put her index finger on the end of my nose. We were summer besties from the moment she fingered me through the troubled summer that led to Roy’s death and on to this day. She was lying.

I joked, “What? I suppose someone’s spread ketchup on the sleeping bag on the bed and plunged a knife into the mattress?” I had the photo, sent a few years ago, Roy, one hand on the knife. Never mind that he was years dead by then.

“No, thank heavens, none of that in years. A beaver. On your new dock. Eviscerated. That is the word, right, Joe?” Joe must have answered in the affirmative. “Tim’s cleaning it up.”

“That’s all?” I breathed a sigh of relief, realizing I had tensed in anticipation of worse. It had been nine years since I made the summer trek to the island, mainly because of Roy, who bothered me everywhere but haunted me there. The upcoming trip was an attempt to come to some agreement with him; peace seemed like a longshot. The beckoning, beseeching nature of the newest photo underscored Roy’s need to be freed.

“I will be there tomorrow. I’m already packed. I just need to shove everything in the car and take off, unless you don’t think I should come at all. Pen?” I waited for Penny’s answer, worried she would warn me away, knowing I would ignore her if she did. Roy needed my help to transition to the next plane if only to stop him from posing for photos. Trust me, it sounded stupid, even to me. Still, Roy needed to go; he really did. I was less sure I could convince him. In life, Roy ran stubborn to obstinate.

“Don’t be silly, Boo, I can hardly wait to see you. Call Meg with your time of arrival. Tim will meet you at the dock whenever you arrive, but mid-day would be perfect, so you’ll have plenty of time to get all your goods up to the cabin and set up housekeeping before dark.”

Tim O’Dell lived with Meg Dixon in the Dixon farmhouse at the bottom of Lower Bay. I met Meg when I met Penny. We endured the same tragedies, including losing a brother, though Meg’s brother still lived.

After Roy’s death, her brother, Brad, left home to travel the seven seas before settling in Australia, buying a sheep station, marrying, and having children. So, it was a joy when Meg found happiness with Tim, who was a couple of years older. A Lake boy, he grew up on a thumb of land that jutted into Lower Bay a little southwest of Booth Island.

“Okay, Pen, what else haven’t you told me?” It was a guess, a good one by the long sigh that followed.

“A branch broke off in the wind last night and split Roy’s grave marker. Tim says it can be fixed.”

“Seems propitious.” The marker was Roy Treader’s only memorial. It seemed cruel that a branch disfigured Roy’s last foothold on earth right before I arrived for our long-postponed, much-needed talk. Unless Roy sensed I was coming and was signaling his unwillingness to debate the issues that shackled him to the island.

Well, he could try. This summer was for us, the opportunity to free me of my charming, athletic, semi-adorable though pesky dead brother. He needed to cough up why he continued to throw me into deep water, forever struggling to grab what was beyond my reach. Had it been the other way around, him up, me down, he would have expected the same of me.

Joe responded, “Accidents, Boothe. Nothing to get steamed up about. Tim will have the marker fixed. Nothing much has changed since you quit summering here. Bodies still float up, trees still get blown over, and the occasional animal gets in the way of a boat propeller. You take care on your drive. Penny can hardly wait to see you. And I look forward to meeting the heroine of so many of Penny’s escapades.”

“Anything else?” I asked.

“As you know, squatters arrive with the spring thaw. Tim saw lights across Beaver Course on the Sturdevant property. Tim and Mike plan a safari to scare off any homeless. It’s an annual event involving hot dogs and beer on Sturdevant Beach.”

Mike Gagne, Penny’s brother, lived in one of the houses on the Gagne property. Mike and I had been a thing when we were both too young to know what being a thing meant. All the promise ended when Roy’s body bounced off the boulders clustered on the north side of the island.

“It’s not Finn Sturdevant, is it? You know he killed my brother, right? I mean, really, tell me he’s not the squatter, and he hasn’t killed again.”

Joe laughed. I was working out what was so funny when Joe added, “No, Boothe, drowned fisherman, dead beaver, tree branch, squatter, that’s all,” Joe answered. “Remember to let Tim know your estimated time of arrival.”

I was still deciding whether to trust a man who called me Boothe when Joe hung up.