“Goodnight Stranger is an uncanny, propulsive novel in which even the most stable-seeming ground moves and shifts like water does. I read with my heart in my throat.”

—Clare Beams, author of We Show What We Have Learned & Other Stories

“Miciah Bay Gault casts a spell with every sentence she writes. Lydia, her brother, and the island itself pulled me into their web—a land of saltwater, secrets, isolation and desire—and didn’t let go, not until long after I’d turned the last page.”

—Robin MacArthur, author of Heart Spring Mountain

About the Author

Miciah Bay Gault grew up on Sanibel Island, Cape Cod, and other beautiful places. A graduate of the Syracuse MFA program, she now teaches in the MFA in Writing & Publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts and is the coordinator of the Vermont Book Award. She lives in Montpelier, Vermont, with her husband, three kids, and some backyard chickens. This is her first novel.

Dedication

For Jeff

Chapter 1

1

Baby B was our brother, and he’d been dead all our lives. For a long time I thought I’d see him again, but by the time I was twenty-eight, I believed that the dead stay dead. I knew that the space he left in our lives would have to be filled in other ways.

That summer I was working in the information booth on the landing, as I had every summer for ten years. It was August, which meant that humidity and the smell of dead sea animals hung in the air like fog. Masts clanged and seagulls cried out in the harbor. The water was blue, green, and gray, and the sight of it made me thirsty.

The ferry was a little white toy as it rounded the tip of the island, growing larger and more substantial as it lumbered into the landing and let down its planks. Passengers descended, blinking and lugging suitcases, and I leaned back to await their questions.

I recognized everyone who stepped off the boat. They all fit into one of three categories: tourist, islander, returning visitor.

I was an expert on tourists. They didn’t know me, but I knew them. With a glance, I could tell why they were here. Some arrived armed with cameras and pocket money, trying to capture the island, fit it onto a scrapbook page. Some came because they loved beauty. Some came to remember the past, or to refuse the future.