From the New York Times bestselling and critically acclaimed author of The Downstairs Girl comes a historical gothic mystery!
HEIRESS OF NOWHERE
By Stacey Lee
1918. Orcas Island, Washington.
Lucy Nowhere has spent her eighteen years working on the vast estate of the eccentric shipbuilder who took her in after she washed ashore in a green canoe as a baby. But she has long wished for a life off the island, and in a matter of days, she is set to leave for college—and, for the first time, choose her own future.
Then she finds her employer’s severed head on the beach. Rumors swirl that a mischievous spirit and its minions, the sea wolves, have struck again. Lucy doesn’t believe in myths. She knows that a human—a human murderer—killed him. And when she is unexpectedly named heiress to the estate, she understands the next target is her.
Her closest friend, the estate’s vigilant young guard, begs her to escape while she can. But Lucy knows the only way she can discover who she is, and free the island of its curse, is to find the real killer—before she becomes the next victim.
CHAPTER 1
Some say the sight of a killer whale, with its black shroud and ghost-white eye patches can stop an animal’s heart mid-beat. That the sea wolves are agents of the demon Orkus, zealously guarding the mysterious Parish Isle off the southern tip of our Orcas Island.
People whisper these things as if they were fact.
I tell myself they are only stories.
I am scrawling Wednesday, August 14, 1918, on my sketch pad when not forty feet away a queen of the sea pokes her head out of the East Sound and ogles me. My dugout slides back a few yards, sending my pencils clattering.
Terror floods me. My throat cinches shut, my hands slip against the paddle.
It is Shadow, with her gray saddle patch. She bridged the half mile between us frighteningly fast. From weeks spent trying to draw her, I know her to be a behemoth, twice as long as my canoe, with the heft of a six-ton armored tank. Her hide gleams like a piece of the sea itself, sunlight breaking across her back as if on stone.
I jam my sketch pad into my leather satchel, and something else splashes behind me. Another dark shape surfaces, dorsal fin flopped to one side like a cowlick. Shadow’s daughter, Scull.
I grip the sides of the canoe, my feet skidding across my pencils.
Shadow shoots me a baleful look, then slips below the surface.
“Huh…” My breath stumbles out of me. I fumble my paddle, feeling trapped in this mile-wide watery corridor, which sits between the two main legs of Orcas Island.
Koa always said I had a death wish. Everyone knows to keep your canoes out of the sound when the killer whales are roaming, especially in summer when the salmon swarm. But the salmon haven’t come. And out here, away from the grand yet suffocating estate of Nowhere, the island teems with color and life. Life that may wish to devour me.
Paddling furiously, I scramble toward the shore at least a thousand feet away, holding my breath. Scull rolls beside me, porpoising as if to play.
Go back, little one, before your mother tears me apart.
No one comes between a mother and her young.
Still no sign of Shadow. She could surge from the depths at any moment, overturn me, drag me into waters cold enough to freeze my blood. Then it would be over for Lucy Nowhere, before she’d ever stepped a toe into the world.
The ocean begins to tremble, and I look wildly around.
Shadow erupts like a volcano from my other side, a raspy haah thundering from her blowhole. Spray blinds me. My canoe rocks violently, a cork in a tidal wave. Languid and menacing, she glides alongside me, so close my paddle could touch the white scars etched into her flank.
My breath wings in and out, and the sickening memory of the seal head found on the beach two weeks ago churns my stomach. Rumors flew that someone had ventured too close to Parish Isle. That the Orkus had sent its sea-wolf minions to leave the severed head as a warning—stay away, or end up like the cannery worker slain the year I was born.
And here I am alone, dangling myself like a worm on a hook.
“I—I’ve been told I have a head made of cast iron,” I babble. “Might give you indigestion.”
Another loud breath erupts from Shadow’s blowhole, baptizing me with a mist that throws a rainbow in the sky.
“Well, you are magnificent,” I murmur.
My neck has begun to warm. I rub at the spot above my collarbone where the purplish whale-shaped blotch lies hidden beneath my kerchief. The mark of the devil, some call it. It has never flared like this before.
Time stretches thin. Shadow’s flipper rises, ribbons of water cascading down.
I close my eyes, bracing for the blow.
But the touch is gentle—a shove, almost a caress. My canoe glides toward the shore. Scull darts to her mother, bumping her playfully.
A giddy laugh nearly splits me in two. The underworld has measured me—and declined its claim. At least for today.
As my vessel quietly retreats, the stories of my arrival here float to mind. I drifted in on a green canoe, a mysterious baby still with her umbilical cord attached, no clue to my origins.
On a warm summer day a dozen years ago, my six-year-old self tried to board a ferry, hoping to find my parents. A man whom I had come to know as Mr. Dakon Sanders sat me down in a garden that faced the sea. “Lucy, your parents are gone, and they will not be coming back.”
Not quite understanding, I glanced up at his profile with its sharp cheekbones and generous outcropping of a nose. He smelled of cigars and pine needles.
His tongue clucked at my confusion. “They are gone, and that is that. But you are a strong girl. See that tree?” He nodded at a slender evergreen with red bark, a few feet taller than me. “Pacific madrone, one of the most beautiful trees here in the Pacific Northwest. That one’s six years old, just like you. Madrones are resilient. They always find the light, even if it means growing a little crooked. That’s why you’re named Lucy, for ‘light.’?”
No, I don’t have a death wish.
Maybe I just crave a family. Nowhere is the only home I remember, but it is not my home.
Some say the sight of a killer whale, with its black shroud and ghost-white eye patches can stop an animal’s heart mid-beat. That the sea wolves are agents of the demon Orkus, zealously guarding the mysterious Parish Isle off the southern tip of our Orcas Island.
People whisper these things as if they were fact.
I tell myself they are only stories.
I am scrawling Wednesday, August 14, 1918, on my sketch pad when not forty feet away a queen of the sea pokes her head out of the East Sound and ogles me. My dugout slides back a few yards, sending my pencils clattering.
Terror floods me. My throat cinches shut, my hands slip against the paddle.
It is Shadow, with her gray saddle patch. She bridged the half mile between us frighteningly fast. From weeks spent trying to draw her, I know her to be a behemoth, twice as long as my canoe, with the heft of a six-ton armored tank. Her hide gleams like a piece of the sea itself, sunlight breaking across her back as if on stone.
I jam my sketch pad into my leather satchel, and something else splashes behind me. Another dark shape surfaces, dorsal fin flopped to one side like a cowlick. Shadow’s daughter, Scull.
I grip the sides of the canoe, my feet skidding across my pencils.
Shadow shoots me a baleful look, then slips below the surface.
“Huh…” My breath stumbles out of me. I fumble my paddle, feeling trapped in this mile-wide watery corridor, which sits between the two main legs of Orcas Island.
Koa always said I had a death wish. Everyone knows to keep your canoes out of the sound when the killer whales are roaming, especially in summer when the salmon swarm. But the salmon haven’t come. And out here, away from the grand yet suffocating estate of Nowhere, the island teems with color and life. Life that may wish to devour me.
Paddling furiously, I scramble toward the shore at least a thousand feet away, holding my breath. Scull rolls beside me, porpoising as if to play.
Go back, little one, before your mother tears me apart.
No one comes between a mother and her young.
Still no sign of Shadow. She could surge from the depths at any moment, overturn me, drag me into waters cold enough to freeze my blood. Then it would be over for Lucy Nowhere, before she’d ever stepped a toe into the world.
The ocean begins to tremble, and I look wildly around.
Shadow erupts like a volcano from my other side, a raspy haah thundering from her blowhole. Spray blinds me. My canoe rocks violently, a cork in a tidal wave. Languid and menacing, she glides alongside me, so close my paddle could touch the white scars etched into her flank.
My breath wings in and out, and the sickening memory of the seal head found on the beach two weeks ago churns my stomach. Rumors flew that someone had ventured too close to Parish Isle. That the Orkus had sent its sea-wolf minions to leave the severed head as a warning—stay away, or end up like the cannery worker slain the year I was born.
And here I am alone, dangling myself like a worm on a hook.
“I—I’ve been told I have a head made of cast iron,” I babble. “Might give you indigestion.”
Another loud breath erupts from Shadow’s blowhole, baptizing me with a mist that throws a rainbow in the sky.
“Well, you are magnificent,” I murmur.
My neck has begun to warm. I rub at the spot above my collarbone where the purplish whale-shaped blotch lies hidden beneath my kerchief. The mark of the devil, some call it. It has never flared like this before.
Time stretches thin. Shadow’s flipper rises, ribbons of water cascading down.
I close my eyes, bracing for the blow.
But the touch is gentle—a shove, almost a caress. My canoe glides toward the shore. Scull darts to her mother, bumping her playfully.
A giddy laugh nearly splits me in two. The underworld has measured me—and declined its claim. At least for today.
As my vessel quietly retreats, the stories of my arrival here float to mind. I drifted in on a green canoe, a mysterious baby still with her umbilical cord attached, no clue to my origins.
On a warm summer day a dozen years ago, my six-year-old self tried to board a ferry, hoping to find my parents. A man whom I had come to know as Mr. Dakon Sanders sat me down in a garden that faced the sea. “Lucy, your parents are gone, and they will not be coming back.”
Not quite understanding, I glanced up at his profile with its sharp cheekbones and generous outcropping of a nose. He smelled of cigars and pine needles.
His tongue clucked at my confusion. “They are gone, and that is that. But you are a strong girl. See that tree?” He nodded at a slender evergreen with red bark, a few feet taller than me. “Pacific madrone, one of the most beautiful trees here in the Pacific Northwest. That one’s six years old, just like you. Madrones are resilient. They always find the light, even if it means growing a little crooked. That’s why you’re named Lucy, for ‘light.’?”
No, I don’t have a death wish.
Maybe I just crave a family. Nowhere is the only home I remember, but it is not my home.
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“Descriptive prose and sensorial imagery bring the intersectionally diverse people and beguiling setting of this gothic whodunit to vivid life. Realistically rendered characters navigate fast-paced events with a dash of romance, culminating in a captivating adventure that perceptively ruminates on themes of colonization, gender discrimination, and environmental collapse.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
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