They’d locked her in! From the outside! Was she to be their prisoner? Was that it?
She began to pound on the wood, to shout for help. She kept on until her knuckles were bloody and her voice hoarse, but no one heard her. Or if they did, no one came to find out what was wrong.
“What are you looking at?”
“It’s an old drawing that was in the newspaper when I was little.”
Libby Carstairs peered over at her friend and companion, Edwina Fishburn, who was called Fish by everyone. They were in the house they were renting in London, in Libby’s bedchamber, and Libby was modeling a gown Fish had finished sewing.
Libby was famous as the Mystery Girl of the Caribbean, and Fish was her seamstress and costumer.
Libby had spent her life journeying across the kingdom, performing at fairs and in small playhouses. With her duplicitous Uncle Harry guiding her way, she’d regaled rural audiences with monologues and ballads about her ordeal at age five when she, Caro, and Joanna, had survived their shipwreck.
In recent months, after Harry’s untimely demise—he’d been shot dead by a jealous husband after he’d seduced the fellow’s wife—she’d come to London and had taken the city by storm. She appeared nightly at London’s most prestigious theater where she brought even the most hardened cynics to tears.
Two decades had passed since they’d been found by Captain Miles Ralston, but people still couldn’t get enough of her. It was the twentieth anniversary of the rescue, and she remained more fascinating than ever.
Harry had hired Fish when Libby was sixteen and had needed to be dressing like an adult rather than the orphaned waif she’d pretended to be. She and Fish were thick as thieves. They existed beyond the bounds of civilized society and pretty much carried on however they pleased.
She held up the tattered page from the newspaper and asked Fish, “Haven’t I ever showed this to you?”
“No. Let me see.”
“When Caro, Joanna, and I first returned to England, there was a desperate push to figure out who we were. The authorities had an artist sketch a picture of us, and it was distributed everywhere. I kept this copy.”
Fish took it from Libby. The paper was thin from Libby caressing it over the years. Fish studied the three cherubic faces, tracing her finger over them. “You were so tiny. I forget how young you were when it happened.”
“I’m a walking miracle. I still can’t explain how or why I lived through it.”
Fish pointed to Libby’s likeness, and she smirked. “Even when you were five, you were too precocious for words.”
“From the very start, I was amazing. Harry always said so.”
As the navy had advertised for family members to claim them, Harry had blustered in and insisted he was a relative. He hadn’t been though. He’d merely been an acquaintance of her mother’s, but no one had realized it, and he’d been allowed to saunter off with her.
He’d been a lazy, shrewd schemer, so it could have been a dicey situation, but with her obvious flair so prevalent, he’d provided a perfect conclusion.
He’d recognized her many talents, and he’d groomed her for a life on the stage. He’d written hundreds of vignettes and songs about the shipwreck. Most of them were invented. She had scant recollection of the dreadful event, but Harry had had a vivid imagination, and she made the stories genuine during her stellar performances.
All in all, she was naught more than a very gifted fraud. Except that she really had been on a ship that sunk. She really had been stuck on a deserted island with Caro and Joanna. It really was a miracle that they’d survived.
She had no idea how long they were stranded. Captain Ralston had tried to get her to describe the length of the period when they’d been marooned, and supposedly, she’d told him that it had been a very, very long time. She hadn’t been able to quantify it any better than that.
The drawing was a priceless memento, and she slid it from Fish’s hand, folded it, and put it back in the dresser. It was like a secret amulet she liked to hold whenever she was feeling low. It soothed her to gaze at Caro and Joanna, to recollect how fond she’d been of them.
Her separation from them was a wound that hadn’t healed. She’d been yanked away from them without their even having a chance to say goodbye.
One minute they’d been huddled in a hotel room, wondering what would transpire, and the next, she’d been given to Harry—a stranger she didn’t know—and whisked away from them. The so-called experts had counselled that a quick, clean break was for the best, so that was the ending that had been implemented.
Over the years, she’d occasionally asked Harry if he could tell her where Caro and Joanna had gone. He’d maintained that he had no idea where they were, and he couldn’t find out.
Once, when she’d been older and particularly adamant that she wanted to search for them, he’d claimed he’d contacted the navy for her, and they’d lost the records.
Libby had believed him. He’d been her world, her family, and she’d relied on him for everything, so whatever lies he’d concocted, she’d swallowed them. She’d trusted him, being terrified he might vanish when she wasn’t looking. Her fear of being abandoned by him had shaped her existence.
She’d never completely recovered from her ordeal, and she had many problems that relentlessly plagued her. She hated the dark and bodies of water, and she grew incredibly anxious in tight spaces. After the voyage to England, she’d definitely never climbed onto a ship again! She’d learned the hard way that they could sink, and she wasn’t willing to tempt Fate ever again.
“Did I tell you,” she said to Fish, “about that newspaper reporter, Howard Periwinkle?”
“Isn’t he the one who’s been harassing you?”
“He insists he knows where Caro and Joanna are living. He’s talked to them.”
“Didn’t Harry check with the navy and they
