The Vines by Shelley Nolden (ebook and pdf reader .TXT) 📕

meadow, he sped up. Above his hiking boots, weeds and poison ivy raked his bare shins.

A whistle sounded, followed by a fwunk.

His joints locked.

If she’d hit him, he’d be feeling extreme pain. Finn exhaled with relief.

Her dusty voice came from behind, high up. He whipped around, and the sun momentarily blinded him.

“The orange,” she said from the branches of a maple. “Leave it.”

His mouth gaped. She must have traveled through the canopy.

He regularly scaled trees for his job as a landscape lighting designer, yet he couldn’t move that fast. No one could.

She pointed at his bag.

As he’d left home that morning, Lily had tucked an orange beneath the cord crisscrossing the front pocket. He lowered his pack to retrieve it and nicked his hand on a scalpel embedded in its flesh. Beads of juice clung to the metal. Finn extracted the instrument.

She maneuvered to a far branch, putting the trunk between them.

The knife seemed heavy. An instrument like it—or this very scalpel—could have caused her scars. He inspected its ivory handle, tracing a small crucifix etched near the hilt.

Just holding the prize from the killing of an elephant made him feel vile.

He let it fall.

Although thin, she didn’t appear to be starving. Throughout his travels, he’d encountered many fascinating people but none who exuded both her toughness and vulnerability. He felt a compulsion to learn what she’d been through, and if it were ongoing, though he sensed that the longer he remained in her presence, the more of an enigma she would become.

For not respecting her privacy earlier, he owed her far more than a bruised piece of fruit.

He removed the insulated bag that contained enough food to keep him going until nightfall, when he’d planned to glide past the patrols. Along with the orange, he tossed it near the tree where he’d last seen her.

He knew he should run. Instead, he waited for her to reappear.

Barely audible over the hoarse squawking of the herons, a morning announcement drifted from the PA system for the neighboring Riker Correctional Facility.

It was as if their encounter had never happened. As if she didn’t exist.

Yet he knew she was still watching him. Despite the burning rash that would result from reaching into the poison ivy, he picked up the scalpel—proof that she’d truly been of this world—and raced toward his kayak.

Two weeks later

July

ily Skolnik clung to the shed along the property line of the Gettlers’ Long Island sore home. Concealed by the encroaching sycamores, she listened to the beating of waves on the distant, rocky shore; the cawing of seagulls; the scratching of black elder branches against the weathered planks; and the heaving of her breath, louder and more primal than all else.

To calm her thudding heart, she fingered a sumac leaf and inhaled the plant’s citrusy scent. Usually, she loved coming here to get away from the congestion and concrete of the city. But, today, she wished she were still at home, enjoying a cup of green tea and a Sudoku puzzle.

Instead, here she was, about to spy on her boyfriend.

Before she could lose her nerve, she pressed her ear to the lichen-encrusted wood. From the far side of the windowless wall came a thunk, followed by a metallic clanging.

Lily knew that Finn had sneaked away from his mother’s birthday celebration on the back patio to have another look at his father’s journals. But something else in there must have caught his attention.

She wished she were with him. Or that she could have been content to keep an eye on Rollie and Kristian, as Finn had asked her to do. Normally she would have eagerly helped, but Finn hadn’t been the same since he’d returned from North Brother Island two weeks earlier, and she needed to know why.

What had he discovered among those ruins? Four years ago, during their third date—a tour of Alcatraz—Finn had casually mentioned his family’s multigenerational involvement in another haunted past. Two years later, after swearing her to secrecy, he’d sheepishly explained that one of his great-grandfather’s patients had recovered from typhus, then scarlet fever, with miraculous speed. Ever since, his family had been looking for the elusive, immune system boosting chemical reagent that they believed she’d ingested. “My dad’s too serious a guy to chase a myth,” Finn had countered when she’d questioned their theory.

It had taken him another year to reveal that his grandfather, who’d treated hundreds of patients at Riverside, had also been a doctor in Hitler’s Schutzstaffel. She understood his hesitation: although her mother had never taken her to a synagogue, Lily was Jewish. Two of her great-uncles had died at Auschwitz.

If Finn had found proof that his grandfather had conducted involuntary medical experiments on those exiled on North Brother, it would explain his sullenness since showering off the stench of the East River.

Repeatedly she’d begged him to tell her what he’d seen. Each time, he’d told her he wasn’t ready to talk about it, that he was still “processing.”

Nervously picking at a hangnail, she pictured him now, paging through his father’s handwritten observations of NYC’s forbidden island—currently off-limits in their conversations.

It hadn’t started that way, she thought bitterly, wiping perspiration from the back of her neck. Even in this shade, the air felt like the hot, steamy breath of a stranger too close on a packed subway car.

Three days before Finn had stolen onto North Brother, he’d asked her to go with him. She had, after all, accompanied him on all five of his dangerous bridge expeditions thus far, despite being too terrified to cross any of the canyons.

Though she had no desire to poke around ruins teeming with asbestos, she’d wanted to be there with him on North Brother Island. She had the means: a kayak stowed beside Finn’s in their basement locker. Only her job as a horticulture coordinator for the Central Park Conservancy had held her back. If the Harbor Unit caught her trespassing in the federally protected heron preserve, she’d surely lose her job.

Maybe she should have