I am an Island Hermit, and I will probably leave this place as dust on the wind.

It’s not a bad way to go.

* * *

“Greetings, Evie. Let’s have ’em.”

“Hello, Mr. Jamon.” I brought out four books from behind the counter at the bookstore. “I’ve chosen them especially for you.” We were busy today. Every time I have a sale and give a free cup of peppermint or chamomile tea away when customers purchase a book, we’re busy. Today the cake was peppermint mocha lava, advertised in the window, so we were pretty full.

He looked at them, grunted. “Not bad, Evie. Once again, not bad.”

Mr. Jamon is eighty-five years old and owns a small fishing company. He lives up on the top of our highest hill in a log cabin his own father built as a family vacation home. The father owned two newspapers in Washington. I’ve seen the log home from a distance but have never been up there. He’s a bit of a hermit. I relate to him, hermit to hermit.

In the last ten years he’s built up a fishing business and employs about ten men and women. He pays incredibly well. All of his fishermen and fisherwomen own homes on the island and drive nice cars. They love him.

“What do I need more money for, Evie?” he said to me about five years ago. “I’m eighty years old. But I can provide jobs for families, so I do.”

But “fisherman” only covers his last job. Up until he became a fisherman, he was the president of the publishing empire his grandfather started and he expanded.

We’re friends, and he is also friends with my mother and aunts. Mr. Jamon has quietly donated money to the schools on the islands, the small hospital, and he’s bought up land all over the islands and put it in trust, so it will never be developed.

Mr. Jamon goes through one or two books a week. His interests run anywhere from biographies, particularly of presidents and leaders around the world; memoirs, particularly of Hollywood actors and actresses; science, particularly the history of space travel; history, particularly World War II. Also physics and politics and occasional spy novels. Recently he has become interested in romance books, “for love,” he told me, “the eternal hope even when you’re my age. Romance isn’t dead and neither am I!” In short, he’s my ideal reader.

“I’ll take them.” He tapped his cane.

“Let me give you some spice cake with cream cheese frosting. Bit of cinnamon in there, too.”

“I can’t say no to that.”

He sat down in the café to eat, and I sat with him. I always do. It’s rude to give someone cake and not eat with them. Plus, the spice cake had zucchini in it. Zucchini is a vegetable, therefore the cake is healthy.

Chapter 6

Betsy Baturra
Multnomah County Jail
Portland, Oregon
1975

Late that night, after Betsy’s baby, Rose, was taken away, she hemorrhaged in her jail cell. A new doctor coming on shift had sent her back to her jail cell after the birth, still bleeding profusely onto a pad, shackled at the wrists and ankles. The two squeamish young guards, reeling from all that screaming and what happened between the prisoner’s legs, led her back.