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  What’s Become of Her is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Deb Caletti

  Reading group guide copyright © 2017 by Penguin Random House LLC

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  BANTAM and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  RANDOM HOUSE READER’S CIRCLE & Design is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Caletti, Deb, author.

  Title: What’s become of her : a novel / Deb Caletti.

  Description: New York : Bantam Books, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016038150 | ISBN 9781101884263 (paperback) | ISBN 9781101884270 (ebook)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Romance / Contemporary. | FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Women Sleuths. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction. | Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3603.A4386 W48 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016038150

  Ebook ISBN 9781101884270

  randomhousebooks.com

  randomhousereaderscircle.com

  Book design by Virginia Norey, adapted for ebook

  Title-page art from an original photograph by FreeImages.com/​Jason Antony

  Cover design: Marietta Anastassatos

  Cover image: © Robert Jones / Arcangel

  v4.1

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Deb Caletti

  About the Author

  Reading Group Guide

  Thou wast all that to me, love,

  For which my soul did pine—

  A green isle in the sea, love,

  A fountain and a shrine…

  —EDGAR ALLAN POE, To One in Paradise

  Back to the land of freedom. Back to breaking the law with her sisters to make sure justice got served. God, just the thought had her tingling all over.

  —FERN MICHAELS, Blindsided

  Chapter 1

  In about twelve minutes, Isabelle Austen’s old life will be gone forever. Right now, though, the seaplane is still in the air, out of her sight, a few miles off the coast of Parrish Island. When it finally arrives and splashes down, and when Henry North ducks out of the doorway, that’ll be it. Done. Over. She has no idea. Not a clue. Dear God, it’d be easy, if you could read the future. But you can’t, so she just stands there on that dock as the air currents shift, and wings tilt, and change jets her direction from across the sea. It’ll all be very good and very bad, quite necessary and disastrous, because love plus tragedy plus fury is a potent but untidy mix. Now she only waits, surrounded by gray, choppy waters.

  There’s a sudden commotion in the sky. She looks up. No, it’s not the plane yet. It’s those birds. The flock of crows is overhead, midway in their evening commute. She watches and can’t help but shiver, because there are hundreds of them. Hundreds. The sky almost turns black. It could be a Hitchcock film, even if it’s just nature, being weird and creepy and magnificent. She has seen this too many times to count, but she never fails to be awestruck.

  Isabelle holds still and listens; she hears the whiff whiff of wings as they pass. A murder of crows, it’s called. No one is exactly sure why. Perhaps it’s due to all those years with a bad rap, with the mean reputation as creatures of terror and loathing. Or it could be because of that old, frightening folktale, which says that crows gather to decide the capital fate of the criminal among them. A death-sentence jury in wings and black satin.

  Look, they come and they come and they come, and it’s like some freak event, only it happens every morning and every night, every single day of the week. If they are harbingers of danger, then there is a lot of danger coming. If they are portents of retribution, the guilty better watch out.

  —

  Then:

  The plane arrives. Isabelle ties it down to the moorings, with big ropes wound in figure eights onto iron cleats. She wipes her hands on her jeans. Eddie Groove, the pilot, cuts the engine of the four-seater Cessna. When he does, there is an abrupt silence. At least, the only sounds are the waves sloshing against the plane’s pontoons, and a far-off radio on a boat, and the whisper-flap of those crows overhead. The propeller slowly spins to a stop.

  Inside, Eddie and the passenger exchange a few last words. The door of the plane opens, and a man appears. He has tousled hair and a quiet confidence and bright eyes with smile crinkles.

  “Welcome, Mr. North,” Isabelle says.

  “Isabelle? Nice to meet you in person.”

  Henry North takes her offered hand and steps onto the dock. Why this handsome man—an innocent-looking man, carrying a leather case and wearing a sweater with soft elbow patches—chose this far-off corner of the world, well, it’s not a question that occurs to her until much later. The too late kind of later. She doesn’t think about what his plans are, or what his history might be, probably because her own history is shouting and crashing so loudly in her head right then. She recently left Evan after eight years together—two married, six not—and her mother’s just died, so she’s as unanchored as a ship from its shore. History jammed with history is always where the trouble starts, even without all the suspicions that shadow Henry North.

  “Beautiful,” he says, as he looks around before settling his gaze back on her.

  The word seems to refer to the harbor, the cove, the island, to the fact that he’s arrived, and even to Isabelle herself. For a second, this makes her feel something lately unfamiliar: happy. Isabelle doesn’t spot the dark circles, which tell the truth of his haunted, sleepless nights. She doesn’t think about crow metaphors and doomed foreshadowing, or what your own wrecked self brings to a situation. Instead, the positive and grateful word beautiful reminds Isabelle that she’s always been a positive and grateful person, and all at once she smells that great gasoline-and-saltwater smell, and notices the way the waves sparkle, and how do you explain a swift turn of mood, anyway? Her emotions have been all over the place. It’s just maybe a good day for once, a good day during a bad time.

  He grins at her, and she smiles back, and right there, zing, something sort of aligns with something else. It’s not the huge, tectonic shift of love at first sight. It’s just a crickle of energy. Still, a grin can be enough to set th
ings in motion, same as a loose rock can start a landslide, same as a burble of lava begins a blast. Things have to start somewhere. Because, what a great grin. It’s the kind that makes you like a person instantly.

  “Did you have a pleasant trip?”

  “I definitely did.”

  He stares straight into her eyes. It’s a trick of both lovers and predators, she realizes, but so what? Blame the fact that she’s brokenhearted (but ready to be done being brokenhearted), recently uprooted, and orphaned (if you can call a thirty-seven-year-old with dead parents an orphan). Blame fate, or the semi-evolved parts of a human brain, whatever. But her heart flops like a newborn. The fingers she’d just grasped were warm and solid, so it’s understandable.

  He shields his view, takes in the eerie flock above. The dock rocks a little. The sky has turned dusky pink. The crows are a multitude of stark shadow puppets flap-flapping behind the sunset screen.

  “Wow.”

  Henry North watches for a while. As he does, Isabelle checks out his nice leather shoes. She takes in the rest of him, too: his left ringless hand holding a briefcase, a maroon bag slung over his shoulder, and Oh, no, Isabelle—the way he smells. He smells like outside, sun plus wind, an open-air largeness that makes her remember old, great summers.

  “ ‘With many a flirt and flutter…’ ” Henry North finally says. To Isabelle’s confused squinch, he clarifies. “Poe. ‘The Raven.’ ”

  “Ah.”

  Intriguing, she thinks.

  Actually, slightly thrilling. A poem! (Though her hiding, cynical side, the dream squasher she ignores, scoffs. A poem?) Evan, the reluctant husband, the cruel heartbreaker, was in pharmaceutical sales. He could quote the highest prescribing physicians in a tristate region, but that was all. Oh, the number of missteps already! She’s completely forgotten that past lovers and future ones are sometimes like dogs. They can look so different from each other, but they’re still the same animal.

  “Does this…” He indicates upward.

  “Every night. Every morning at sunrise, too.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it. What are they doing?”

  “Coming home. They go to Friday Harbor for the day and then return here to their roost.”

  These are common questions. Most of Island Air’s flights leave in the early hours and arrive at dusk, a schedule that nearly matches that of the crows, so the unrushed tourist will often ask. Right then, Isabelle can see another one of their pilots, Liz Rajani, off in the sky-distance. She’s in the tiny yellow-and-white Beaver, bringing six passengers for a family reunion on Parrish. Out their left-side windows, they’ll glimpse the swath of black, looking like the long, trailing scarf of a widow.

  If they even notice. If they’re not too busy chatting about so-and-so’s new boyfriend and Aunt Someone’s heart attack and whether they’ve ordered enough chicken for the barbecue. Who ever notices omens, anyway.

  —

  Pilot Eddie salutes Isabelle with two fingers, indicating he’s done, that’s all, no more help needed. All the pleasantries with the customer are finished—the Thank you and the You’re welcome and the Have a great time. Henry North walks up the dock with the intoxicated-looking gait of one unaccustomed to the bumping and rocking of water. It makes him appear humble and vulnerable, and so do those soft elbow patches. With his briefcase, he seems like a too-serious child, the ill-fated sort, on the way to a school full of bullies.

  Isabelle feels a gust of concern for this stranger, the sort of compassionate goodwill that gets a thoughtful person into trouble. On a whim, she follows him, trots to catch up, not something she would generally do. It’s unusual enough that she feels Eddie Groove’s eyes boring into her back, or maybe that’s just her good sense jabbing her between her shoulder blades.

  It’s not Eddie’s business, anyway. He’s known her since she was small, but she’s his boss now. Since her mother died and she came back here five months ago, Island Air is hers until she decides what she wants next. What she wants next is a question that gapes like the dark mouth of a cave. All she knows so far is that she wants things to be easier than they have been. It’s been effort, effort, effort trying to make things work with Evan; she’d put the coins in that particular slot machine for years hoping for the sweet jackpot of a happy marriage and children, and instead, the slot machine just stopped taking coins one day. That dream is gone, but she maybe still wants the regular good stuff a life can offer—love, a little happiness, peace.

  But maybe she wants to take chances, too. She’s always been so ridiculously careful. She kind of hates herself for it. Come on—be bold! Life is short, right? Hers is a complicated legacy—might as well get some pleasure out of it. For all the mess and hassle, she can at least have a pleasant conversation with a good-looking man. Why not? She’s a grown woman, for God’s sake. Sometimes grown women must remind themselves that they are grown women.

  I sign your paycheck, Eddie, so stop looking at me like that, she thinks, while Eddie is only peering at the distant sky, gauging the change in weather. Isabelle gets angry with the wrong people and not angry enough with the right ones. It’s silent anger, besides; all stomachaches and insomnia, because anger is nuclear. Her acts of rebellion occur mostly in her head, which has been a big problem. Another problem: It can be hard to tell if your best traits are actually your worst ones. You’ve got a kind heart, Isabelle, her friend Anne used to say, and it’s the common refrain. Her entire life, from the first grade on, when Mrs. Baxter paired her with Tony Jasper to be a good influence, it’s been You’re so helpful! You’re always smiling! You’re so nice! Nice can feel like being shoved in a trunk with your wrists bound and your mouth taped shut.

  Her mother is gone, so there’s no hovering threat, no forceful presence or hand about to smack. Evan is gone, too, so there’s no moody baby-man to tiptoe around. She can be anyone she wants. Do whatever she wants. She can rewrite her own history, starting today. She has always wanted to travel, to be a part of a wider world, so how about it, huh? She can be spontaneous, learn to scuba dive, climb Everest (okay, maybe not climb Everest).

  She finds Henry North waiting just outside the small white bungalow that serves as Island Air’s office. He faces the street that’s rapidly filling with ferry traffic.

  “You have a ride?” Isabelle is out of breath from the jog. She should exercise more. Grief makes you eat too much. She needs to start swimming again.

  He slings the bag from his shoulder, but before he sets it down, he eyes the ground as if checking for other people’s impoliteness—chewed gum or cigarette butts. Maybe it’s a detail she should take note of. Maybe it hardly matters in the grand scheme of things. Henry takes his wallet out of his pocket, fishes inside. “I do. Remy Wilson? Coming to pick me up.”

  Isabelle’s surprised. Remy’s got a few vacation properties, but she rents only long-term now. This one bag—it’s a bag for a weekend, not for a year. He hands her a folded slip of paper with an address on it—the address of Remy’s house off Deception Loop, near Isabelle’s own.

  “You have my cell already, right? Now you know where you can find me.”

  He smiles again. Suddenly, she can’t speak. It’s like a pair of hands are on her throat, squeezing. One could get all self-helpy and say she’s never had a voice, and while it might be true, this is an actual, physical happening. Her body is likely shouting things, but who can hear over the rumble and roar of Liz’s plane coming close, ready to splash down. Isabelle better hurry back to secure the Beaver, but she doesn’t move. The last of the crows have passed. Isabelle sees Remy Wilson’s old VW coming up the road. Remy is about a million years old. Isabelle wouldn’t get into a car with her unless it was dark and she was being chased and she was out of options. Even then, even with her life in danger, they’d chug along at twenty miles an hour, tops.

  The VW spurts and splutters and Remy pulls up, rolls down her window. She pops her head out, her hair a white dandelion poof. “Isabelle, sweetie. Glad I caug
ht you. I wanted to say sorry about your mom.”

  “Thanks, Remy.”

  “That old bitch. People like that, you think they’ll live forever. Get in,” she says to Henry North.

  Henry and Isabelle meet eyes. Isabelle shrugs, and Henry smiles. “See you soon,” he says, and this is how it starts. Or ends, depending on whether you’re Henry North or poor Isabelle Austen herself.

  Chapter 2

  Six thousand miles away, as Isabelle closes the bedroom window of her mother’s house and takes a last look at the hypnotic spin of the Point Perpetua lighthouse before turning in, Professor M. Weary shuts off his computer.

  Henry North has been on Parrish Island for exactly six hours.

  The professor knows this, and much, much more. He knows when Henry left, and how much his ticket cost. He even knows where Henry sat on the Island Air flight from Seattle: seat C, which on that model of Cessna is behind and to the right of the pilot. At least, that was the assigned seat on North’s ticket, paid for with his Visa card.

  It’s all so easy! People will keep on being who they are, for starters, and on the Internet you can find out anything. The glorious, ever-flowing, ever-providing Internet. Even when the Wi-Fi goes in and out and in and out, a little perseverance and patience will pay off. Professor Weary loves, loves, loves the Internet. It’s technological magic, information gratification. What did we ever do before? How did we spy, stalk, and scheme? How did we look up the answers to crucial, nagging questions, like the name of that actor on the tip of your tongue or the whereabouts of one’s enemy?