Hide island

When she felt he wouldn’t notice she turned slightly to her left and looked out the large, picture window. The bay was still but enormous clouds pierced by a few crayon-like streaks of sun were massing over the water. Outside there was a fairly strong wind but she could barely hear it, only see some rare white caps on the water.

They were sitting in parallel reclining chairs not close enough to touch without an effort although with Mr. R (as she called him to herself) she had nothing to worry about anyway since he had no interest in her that way. He’d answered her ad eagerly in the Gulfport Gabber for a domestic helper for his condominium but unlike a few of her former clients had never made a pass at her. Instead, he simply wanted to talk, each day giving her less actual domestic work to do. He talked mostly about his son, Chris, whom he was talking about again now in an almost ghostly voice that grew softer as each sentence progressed until it was almost a whisper.

“Did I tell you the story he made up called ‘Hide Island’?”

“No you didn’t,” she said.

“It takes place not too far from here along the coast of southern Georgia.”

She nodded to feign interest, then realizing he may have missed it, turned toward him and nodded again.

“A family of four called the Culversons was going on a vacation and came to a fork in the road. On the left was a sign that said ‘To Jekyll Island,’ on the right was a sign pointing to ‘Hide Island.’ The family, who had all read the book, thought this was funny.”

“‘Well, I guess if we know what’s good for us, the choice is obvious,’ the mother said with a laugh, ‘Jekyll Island here we come.’”

“By the way,” Mr. Richardson said, “there really is a Jekyll Island that’s a center for ecological study and tourism of a kind. Anyhow, Mrs. Culverson’s son said, ‘Jekyll Island sounds so lame and we know what it is anyway. Let’s go to Hide Island instead. It’s probably got a haunted house or at least a water park.’”

“The mention of the word ‘water park’ was all it took for his younger sister, Candy Culverson, to adopt his cause and soon the Culversons were heading toward Hide Island.”

She snuck a look at her watch while he was clearing his throat. Ruth always got so angry when she was late. Sometimes Justine felt being at Mr. R’s was the easiest money she’d ever made but other times she wanted to quit because her job, while physically easy, was emotionally draining. She felt anxious about people or situations she didn’t understand and she didn’t understand Mr. Richardson and his relationship with Chris. Of course, she realized Chris was dead but Mr. R had only said that once and so softly and seemingly long ago it was as if she’d imagined or dreamed it.

“As soon as the Culversons stopped at the town’s only restaurant for lunch,” Mr. Richardson continued, “they began to notice how odd all the customers looked.”

“Almost all of them wore black hoods or masks that completely covered their faces. Those people whose faces weren’t covered had a chalky, bleached-out quality to their skin yet they lurched about energetically enough and few of them were skinny.”

“What the Culversons began to discover was that Hide Island was populated almost exclusively by a new kind of zombie created by the island’s governor, Dr. Franklin Hide, whose laboratory (and ultimate hiding place) was located in a vast underground cave. For security reasons Dr. Hide had bred a species of both trees and plants that grew extraordinarily thick leaves and completely covered his cave. Inside the cave, in his laboratory, he trained his creations to fit into the ‘human population’ of Hide Island.”

“Why did the secretive Dr. Hide advertise Hide Island, albeit selectively, leaving that sign in the fork in the road that...