Free Deadly Pursuit by Michael Prescott

part of that thought. Was he ready to head home the day after tomorrow, to go back to the life of a corporate attorney while his wife resumed scrounging for contributions to PBS?
    She watched her husband, his face limned by starlight and the pale glow from the kitchen window. Wire-frame glasses shielded his gray, thoughtful eyes. His short brown hair was in need of combing. He was thin, almost skinny, not very muscular; work left him no time for an exercise program, but at least he didn’t smoke, thank God.
    A rumpled T-shirt and cut-off jeans were his only attire. He hated dressing up, felt imprisoned by a jacket and tie. Lately he seemed to feel imprisoned by a lot of things.
    He was staring past the rhododendrons and the trellises of bougainvillea, out to the sea. That distant gaze was the same one she had seen so often in recent months, as he looked past her, always past her, out a dew-frosted window or upward at the purple bellies of rain-pregnant clouds.
    For a long while nothing had seemed to interest him. Then in March, he’d chanced to see an ad for Pelican Key in a travel magazine. Until then he hadn’t known that the elder Larson had died, or that the island was now available as a getaway spot.
    Immediately he latched on to the idea of going there. His determination to do so became an obsession. Coming up with the money meant taking a knife to their savings, and Kirstie resisted until she saw that he would not be denied.
    Still, it was not the island as such that mattered to him or occupied his thoughts; she knew that. It was youth, or innocence, or some other intangible thing he felt he’d lost.
    She wished she could help him. But she didn’t know how.
    Anastasia yawned and stretched supine on the patio tiles, her left ear ticking irritably at a mosquito. Kirstie smiled down at her, enjoying the beauty of the animal, the lean limbs and supple angularity of a purebred Russian wolfhound. The dog was three years old, milk white, her long hair the color and texture of fine silk. A bushy tail fanned out behind her like a silvery spray of moon rays.
    Poor Ana was exhausted now, after her earlier encounter with the frog. She had discovered it in the garden shortly after sunset. Its madcap hopping had first perplexed her, then driven her frantic with frustration as the frog eluded her pursuit. Finally she’d hounded the frog into the trees on the verge of the garden, where with a final buoyant leap it had vanished into a deep thicket of anemone.
    “I still can’t get over how new this place looks,” Steve said suddenly, and she knew his mind had been leafing through a scrapbook of memories again. “When we used to come here, it was like an ancient ruin. Literally uninhabitable. The garden was completely overgrown, and the orchard was a jungle.”
    “Orchard?” She’d explored the entire island a dozen times and had seen no evidence of one.
    “Oh, it’s long gone now. Swallowed by the forest, I guess. But back in the twenties this was a lime-tree plantation. Where we’re staying was the owner’s place. Those ramshackle row houses about a hundred yards from here—they were the workers’ quarters. I’m surprised Larson didn’t have them bulldozed.”
    Kirstie had never asked him about the island’s history; vaguely she’d assumed he wouldn’t know much about it. But she should have known better, shouldn’t she? In many ways this was the most important place in the world to him.
    “Why was the plantation abandoned?” she asked, stroking Anastasia’s back with her bare foot.
    “The Depression shut it down, and the big hurricane drove off whoever was still here in 1935.”
    “Hurricane?”
    “It was a monster. Roared out of the Atlantic on Labor Day morning. There was a train running on the old railroad tracks, picking up evacuees. When the hurricane made landfall at Upper Matecumbe, it just knocked that train off the tracks. Eight hundred people died.”
    “Eight hundred.” Kirstie drew a