Nathan smiled. “She liked hazelnut cookies and she was incredibly smart. With a good education, she would have made it far. She didn’t last long in Coldville. At seventeen, she headed to Portland, where she worked as a waitress… She was Noah’s fiancée.”
Surprised, I removed my finger from the name. “Troy was engaged?”
“Yes. He still wears the ring.”
“His silver ring is an engagement ring?”
Nathan nodded. “It’s platinum, pretty expensive… I don’t think Noah ever got over her loss. He loved Hazel Lynn with all his heart. He was as attached to her as a person can be attached to someone.”
Troy had said that about Nathan and Lea too. Maybe he was referring to himself. I felt sorry for him. “When did she die?”
“A year and a half ago. They met in Portland. Noah is the only one of us who isn’t from Coldville apart from Kjertan and Rayk. They both moved there later.”
“So he’s doing all this because of Hazel Lynn?” I had thought all along that he didn’t fit in with the others, just like Isaac.
Nathan glanced over his shoulder at me. “Noah comes from a super-rich family in Portland. Long-established Dutch nobility. Van Veenstra. That says it all.” He grinned. “He had to get used to our rough manners at first.”
“How did she die? Where did you bury her? What else do you know about her?” Knowledge meant learning more about him and his life, and I wanted that at any cost.
Nathan rolled over and sat up. For a moment, he looked out the window, but it seemed as if he had drifted off into a memory. “Noah took her to Coldville for burial after the doctors couldn’t help her at the hospital. She received a white cross in the row, just like she wanted. Her death was…she suffered…it broke Noah’s heart…destroyed him…” He was silent and wouldn’t look at me. “Maybe you should pick someone else.” He obviously didn’t want to say anything more, but I wasn’t looking for another name, so I asked about something else.
“What were your parents like? Do you want to talk about them?” I had never asked him that question before because I still remembered his violent reaction on the Agamemnon.My family is none of your business. On the other hand, he had said later that he wanted to tell me things that he didn’t even admit to himself.
This time he remained calm. A smile, heavy and light like a thousand bittersweet memories flitted across his face. “My mom and dad were great people, Will. You would have loved them and they would have loved you. They were very religious, staunchly Catholic, which is why we all received biblical names.”
“I think that’s nice.” I had the name that Dad had chosen as my first name. Willa meant the strong-willed one, a name that had never suited me.
Nathan looked at me. “My family was dirt poor, one of the poorest in Coldville, but we didn’t need much. We lived in a tiny house with only two rooms, only a little bigger than the huts here and not much more solid. Food was often scarce and the winters were hard and freezing. The work that had to be done was hard and exhausting. My mom and dad often couldn’t get enough for us. I remember my mother crying a lot because of it…but I never missed out on anything.” He took a deep breath and looked at me. “All my happiness was in Coldville. It was my paradise… That is before everyone got sick.”
His words saddened me, but they also showed me what kind of person he was. Someone who appreciated the most important things in life. Family and love. But he had lost both. I was glad he was so open. “You, Isaac, and Lea—you left Coldville because Isaac was afraid you would be put into separate homes?”
Nathan nodded. “Coldville may be isolated, but the authorities always show up at some point. Sometimes sooner, sometimes later. That is why Isaac urged us to leave Coldville. It was crazy. We stowed away down the Mississippi because Isaac said all the French settlers went to Louisiana when they were driven out of Canada. There would be work for us in the bayous and no one would ask our age or where we came from. But our journey to the bayous lasted over two years. We moved from shack to shack, stole food, and were caught raiding chicken coops several times by farmers. Twice, they beat Isaac and me half to death instead of calling the cops…Southern-style… We led a dishonest life, Will. A life on the fringe of society.” He stood and pulled on his shorts, and then his dark jeans. We never had much time and we always went back one at a time, just like we came here one by one.
I rose and slipped on a pair of oversized boxer shorts and the black frilly pants. “And later you worked as a crabber in the bayous despite your allergy?”
He nodded. “Isaac and I didn’t return to Coldville until much later, mainly to see our homeland and old friends again. When we left back then, we didn’t know about the poisoned waters. At first, we thought the deaths were a coincidence, bad luck, a tragedy. The old folks often complained about the refineries, but the official word at the time was that the rivers and lakes were fine. That was why many people stayed. A fallacy. The true extent of the disaster only became apparent in the years to come.”
I grabbed my white shirt and pulled it over my head. As always, the subject left me breathless. “But you didn’t stay in Coldville long after you returned, did you?”
“Isaac wanted to go to New York. He had saved money and…” A shout from the distance made Nathan pause. “That was Ian!” he said, and then Ian shouted again. “Nathan…Willa…damn it, where are you? Someone is approaching the island!”
Nathan and I looked at each other in alarm. My pulse rose to one hundred and eighty. “Isaac?” I whispered.
“Or your father’s people!” Nathan was almost out of the hut when he turned. “Come on, come with me!”
I grabbed his shirt, which he had left on the ground, and took his outstretched hand.
We hurried back together, but halfway there, Icarus approached, completely out of breath. His face was bright red. “There are two motorboats at the front of the basin heading for our island.” Fear filled me as we hurried after him.
“Will, go into the hut.” It was an order that Nathan gave, but I was happy to obey.
I bounded up the steps while the others remained on the dock.
In the hut, I ran to the porch where I could see the boats clearly, two dark shadows on the water. They were still far away, but I remembered the night Isaac had boarded the Agamemnon. How quickly they had reached us then! And just like then, we had no weapons that could compete with rifles or pistols. Nathan had asked Pan to sink Maury’s Glock in the swamp. A precautionary measure in case the traitor was one of the men on Lost Memories.
Despite the heat, I suddenly shivered and pulled Nathan’s shirt over my head. I hesitated for a moment and then reached into my breast pocket. My heart was beating rapidly. Nathan’s cell phone. In his haste, he had forgotten it!
Chapter 7
