A white curtain hangs beside my bed, cutting off my view of the doorway. My hospital room is a double, and the patient in the other bed is a popular woman who has a steady stream of visitors bearing flowers. I can smell the scent of roses, and through the curtain I hear greetings of: “Hi, Grandma!” and “How ya feeling, honey?” and “We can’t wait for you to come home!” The voices of people who love her.

On my side of the curtain there is silence. My only visitors have been Ned Haskell, who stopped by yesterday to assure me that he is looking after my cat, and the two Maine State Police detectives who came to see me this morning, to ask many of the same questions they asked me yesterday. They have searched Ben’s house and they found the painting I described. They found his laptop, which contained photos of me as well as Charlotte, taken with a telephoto lens through our bedroom window. Perhaps what happened to me is also how it happened to Charlotte: a flirtation between the town doctor and the pretty new tenant of Brodie’s Watch. Had she sensed a disturbing undercurrent in his pursuit and tried to break it off? Faced with rejection, had he reacted with violence, just as he had with fifteen-year-old Jessie Inman two decades ago?

    When you own a boat, it’s easy to dispose of a body; what’s difficult is hiding the fact your victim has gone missing. He’d packed up Charlotte’s belongings and made it appear to everyone that she had left town on her own, but details had eventually tripped him up: the PO box overflowing with her mail. The decomposing body that unexpectedly surfaced in the bay. And her car, a five-year-old Toyota packed with her belongings, which only yesterday was found abandoned fifty miles from Tucker Cove. Had it not been for those details—and for all the questions I kept asking—no one would have known that Charlotte Nielson never made it alive out of the state of Maine.

My murder too, could just as easily have been overlooked. I’m the crazy tenant who saw ghosts in her house, who had a bin full of empty wine bottles in her kitchen. A woman who just might stagger up to the widow’s walk one night and tumble over the railing. The townsfolk would shake their collective heads about the unfortunate death of a boozy outsider. The curse of Captain Brodie strikes again, they’d think.

I hear more visitors spill into the room and there’s a fresh round of “Hi, darlin’!” and “You look so much better today!” But I lie alone on my side of the curtain, staring out the window, where raindrops tip-tap on the glass. The doctors say that I can leave the hospital tomorrow, but where will I go?

I only know I will not return to Brodie’s Watch, because there is something in that house, something that both terrifies me and also draws me in. Something that was captured on camera the night the ghost hunters were there, something that moved in to engulf me as I slept. But now I wonder about the shadow that slithered toward me across my bedroom. Perhaps it was there not to attack me, but to protect me from the real monster in my house: not a ghost, not a demon, but a live man who had already killed one girl in the turret.

    The door whooshes open and shut again, admitting yet more visitors for my popular roommate. I watch the rain spatter the window and think about what happens next. Home to Boston. Finish the manuscript. Stop drinking.

And Lucy. What do I do about Lucy?

“Ava?”

The voice is so soft I almost don’t hear her through the chatter of my roommate’s visitors. Even as I register the voice, I can’t believe it’s real. She is just another ghost, someone I’ve conjured up, as I once conjured up the ghost of Captain Brodie.

But when I turn to look, there is my sister stepping past the bed curtain. In the gray light through the window, her face is sallow, her eyes sunken with fatigue. Her blouse is wrinkled and her long hair, which is usually swept back into a tidy ponytail, tumbles windblown and tangled to her shoulders. Yet she is beautiful. My sister will always be beautiful.

“You’re here,” I murmur in wonder. “You’re really here.”

“Of course I am.”

“But why—how did you know?”

“I got a call this morning from some man named Ned Haskell. He said he’s a friend of yours. When he told me what happened to you, I jumped right in the car and just kept driving.”

Of course it would be Ned who called her. During his visit yesterday, he’d asked me where my family was, and I’d told him about Lucy. My cleverer, kinder older sister. “Don’t you think she should be here?” he’d asked.

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me you were in the hospital?” Lucy demands. “Why did I have to hear about it from a complete stranger?”

I have no good answer. She sits down on my bed and takes my uninjured hand and I squeeze it so hard that my knuckles turn white. I’m afraid to let go, afraid that she will dissolve like Brodie, but her hand remains as solid as ever. It’s the same hand that held mine on my first day of school, the hand that braided my hair and brushed away my tears and high-fived me when I landed my first job. The hand of the person I love most in the world.

    “You have to let me help you, Ava. Please let me help you. Whatever the problem is, whatever’s bothering you, you can tell me.”

I blink away tears. “I know.”

“Be honest with me. Tell me what’s wrong. Tell me what I did to turn you away from me.”

“What you did?” I look at her tired, perplexed face and I think: Here is yet another way I’ve harmed her. Not only did she lose Nick, she thinks she lost me, as well.

“Tell me the truth,” she pleads. “What did I do wrong? What did I say?”

I think of how the truth would destroy her. Confession might help me heal, might relieve me of this overwhelming burden of guilt, but it must be my burden alone. When you love someone as much as I love her, the ultimate gift I can bestow is ignorance. Captain Brodie has forced me to face my guilt, to atone for my sins. Now it’s time for me to forgive myself.

“The truth, Lucy, is that…”

“Yes?”

“It’s my fault, not yours. I’ve been trying to hide it from you, because I’m ashamed.” I wipe my face but I can’t keep up with the tears that keep trickling down and soaking my hospital gown. “I’ve been drinking too much. And I’ve ruined everything,” I sob. The answer is both honest and incomplete, but there is enough truth in it to make her nod in recognition.

“Oh, Ava. I’ve known about it for a long, long time.” She wraps her arms around me and I inhale the familiar Lucy scents of Dove soap and kindness. “But we can do something about it, now that you’re ready to let me help. We’re going to work on this together, the way we always do. And we’re going to get through this.” She pulls back to look at me, and for the first time since Nick died, I can look her in the eye. I can hold her gaze and also hide the truth, because that is what you sometimes have to do when you love someone.

    She brushes a strand of hair off my face and smiles. “Tomorrow, I’ll get you out of here. And we’ll go home.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Unless you have a good reason to stay in Tucker Cove?”

I shake my head. “I have no reason at all to stay,” I tell her. “And I am never, ever coming back.”

Thirty-One

One year later

A widow and her two children now live in Brodie’s Watch. Rebecca Ellis bought the house in March, and already she has put in a vegetable garden and built a stone patio that faces the ocean. All this I learned from Donna Branca when I called her three weeks ago, to find out if the house is available to be photographed. My new book The Captain’s Table is scheduled for publication next July, and because the book is as much about the place as it is about the food, Simon wants to include photos of me at Brodie’s Watch. I told him I didn’t want to return, but he insisted these photos are necessary.

Which is why I now find myself riding in a white van with a photographer and a stylist, headed back to the house I fled a year ago.

Donna told me that the family’s been happy living in their new home, and Rebecca Ellis has had no complaints whatsoever. Perhaps the captain’s ghost has finally departed. Or perhaps he was never there in the first place, except as a figment of my imagination, conjured up by shame and guilt and far too many bottles of booze. I have not had a drink since I left Tucker Cove, and the nightmares are less and less frequent, but I am still nervous about returning to Brodie’s Watch.

    Our van climbs the driveway and all at once, there it is looming above us, the house that still casts a long shadow over my dreams.

“Wow, what a gorgeous place,” says Mark the photographer. “We’ll get some great shots here.”

“And look at those huge sunflowers in the garden!” pipes up our stylist Nicole from the backseat. “Should we ask the new owner if I can cut a few for the photos? What do you think, Ava?”