Page 23 of Beautiful Ugly
“Midge.That’s enough.”
“I’ve started, so I’ll finish,” Midge says, pouring us both another drink and ignoring her sister. “The woman came on the ferry—it was during the tourist season, so Sandy didn’t think to ask too many questions—but, unlike the other day-trippers, she never went back to the mainland. On an island this small, one of us would have known if she was staying, but she arrived on the island, then vanished.”
It can’t be Abby. That would be too much of a coincidence and there’s no such thing.
“And this was a year ago?” I ask and Midge nods. “What did she look like?”
“I don’t know, I never saw her. But here’s the thing, nobody else did either. Nobody except Sandy saw her after she walked off the ferry. And then Sandy found the body a few weeks later.”
I feel sick. “The woman’s body?”
“No. Keep up, she was never seen again. It was a man. No ID, nothing. Just a body washed up on the beach. But maybe the mystery woman had something to do with it.”
“I thought you said there was no crime on the island?” I say, turning to Sandy.
She shrugs. “Thereisn’t. He’d been dead a long time when I found him. I reckon whatever happened to him happened on the mainland. Tide carried him here is all.”
“What did she look like, the woman who came here?” I ask Sandy.
“I don’t remember her face, but I do recall she was traveling alone and looked very anxious on the ferry. Some folks don’t like boats,” Sandy says. “It was a year ago and, no offense, all people from the mainland look the same to me. Though I confess I won’t forget the dead man in a hurry. The body was so badly decomposed from being in the water he was impossible to identify—”
“Andhe was missing a hand,” Midge whispers with a strange sense of glee. “It was like something from a horror film. Are you okay, Grady? You’ve gone quite pale.”
PERFECTLY IMPERFECT
One Week Before She Disappeared
ABBY
“Help can be hard to ask for,” the woman I’ve come to see says. “You’ve done the right thing by talking to someone about your feelings, and I want to help if I can.” She doesn’t seem to understand that it’s already too late. When life bends itself into a question mark you start looking for answers, and when you can’t find the right ones, you go looking for the wrong ones instead. That’s all there is to it.
“If you don’t want to tell me what you’ve been lying to your husband about, that’s okay,” she says, pulling a face that suggests it isn’t. I assess her, the way she has been assessing me. The blond hair, the black clothes, the sensible shoes. She’s so calm, collected and sure of herself that I start to dislike her. She uncrosses her legs then crosses them the other way before flicking her lovely long hair over her shoulder again. I imagine hacking it off with a pair of shears, and the thought makes me relax a little. “Have you always found it difficult to be honest in relationships?”
It feels like an insult disguised as a question and I have to think before answering. “Not with everyone.”
The woman in black nods as though she understands.
But she doesn’t.
“We learn how to form and behave in relationships at a very youngage,” she says. “Like most things, we first learn by imitating others, from watching other people and copying how they interact. That often means learning from our parents. Did your parents have a loving relationship?” she asks.
I think about the screaming arguments.
The crying.
The axe.
“I was still very young when they separated,” I say.
“I’m sorry, you did mention that another woman raised you. What happened to your birth mother? Tell me about her. What do you remember most when you think about her?”
I find it hard to suppress a sigh. Not everything in life is the result of mommy issues, and this is not going to help, but I indulge her anyway.
“My mother wanted me to learn how to play the piano,” I say.
Figuring out which other parts of the story to share is a little more difficult.
My mother inherited the piano when her aunt died. It was very distinctive, with birds painted on its side. My mother would have preferred to have been left money; we didn’t have any, but her great-aunt Veronica—who she said wasn’t great, or even a real aunt, and who I had never met—left her a piano and a blue vase instead.