I managed to hold myself together after that. My uncle and I ate dinner in silence, neither of us wanting to bring up what had just happened. Simon, I assumed, because he was as crappy at handling the emotions of others as I was, and me because I didn’t have anything to say.
That was a lie. I did have something to say, but it wasn’t anything I was ready to admit. If I spoke up, I’d have to ask Simon to call a doctor, get me an MRI, a psych eval, something. I couldn’t deny it anymore—there was something wrong with me, and it had started going wrong the second I set foot on the island.
I couldn’t even begin to deal with that after what had happened in the library, so I just kept my mouth shut. It felt weird, just eating and not talking, like a normal dysfunctional family where nobody hallucinates a little girl’s bloody footprints, but it was better than either of us bringing up what had just happened.
The painfully awkward silence was broken by the sound of tires pulling into the drive. Simon looked up. “That’s Veronica. Do you mind putting the dishes in the sink?”
I shook my head, going one better and actually washing them. I was on my way upstairs to do homework when I heard my uncle and Mrs. MacLeod talking in the front hallway. I tiptoed to the edge of the staircase in my stocking feet, staying out of sight against the wall so they wouldn’t see me if they looked up at the landing.
“It can’t happen soon enough,” Simon said. “You should have seen her, Veronica. It wasn’t pretty.”
“I still think you’re full of it,” Mrs. MacLeod grumbled. “She’s not going to be able to handle it, Simon. She’s weak, just like her mother.”
I bristled, fighting the urge to stomp down there and tell her off again. Simon held up a hand before I could. “Enough, Veronica. It’s not your call.”
“No, and it’s not your only problem,” Mrs. MacLeod snarled. “I ran into Liam Ramsey on the mainland today, and he was even less charming than usual. They want their pound of flesh for that dead boy, Simon, and if you waffle much longer, they’re not going to be too particular about who they cut it out of.”
“You let me worry about Liam,” Simon snapped.
Mrs. MacLeod huffed. “Your mother—”
“—knew when to keep her mouth shut, and I’d appreciate it if you learned before I lose my temper!” Simon bellowed.
The dusty crystals in the chandelier hanging over the foyer rattled, like a wind had rushed through the house. The lights dimmed and then flared, and I heard a faint exhale of terrified air from Mrs. MacLeod. Then her footsteps retreated, at a brisk clip, without another word.
I backed up into the shadows on the landing. I just hoped Simon never screamed at me that way. He sounded way too much like my mother.
The next morning being Saturday, I woke up ready to stop telling myself lies and actually face up to what was going on with me. Maybe do some more careful poking around by asking Simon more about Mom and my grandmother.
Then reality crashed over me. I wasn’t doing anything like that today. All I was doing was getting dressed and meeting Simon outside the manor house’s back door. The sky was crushingly crystal blue, but along with the clear weather came a snap of cold that took the breath out of my lungs the minute I went outside. I’d found a black coat in the hall closet, and put on my darkest jeans and shirt, turning it inside out to hide the band logo.
The boat delivered the casket early. I skipped that part. Let Mrs. MacLeod drive my mother to the cemetery. I’d already said everything I ever wanted to say to her. Simon, I reminded myself as I shoved my hands into my armpits to thaw them out. This is for Simon. Not her.
I had thought about calling Doyle to at least talk about how messed up this DIY funeral was, but the memory of blood on my skin, the bloody footprints, the dream that had somehow still cut my foot open, stopped me. I wasn’t in any state to be confiding in anyone right now. I walked behind Simon along the gravel road, away from the mansion, my chest getting tighter with every step, like what waited on top of the little hill was yanking me in.
“Nearly there,” Simon said as we turned the opposite way from the forest along the property line, climbing past the lighthouse to the highest point on the cliff, where thorny wild roses and brambles sheltered a small plot hemmed in by an iron fence. Simon opened the gate for me and gave me a kind smile, pushing his glasses up his nose. He was so far from the screaming lunatic I’d seen last night I had to think Mrs. MacLeod had just pushed him over the edge. “It’s nothing to be afraid of.”
I lifted my chin. “Do I look like I’m afraid?”
“No,” he said. “Like my sister, I doubt you’re afraid of much.” He snapped off one of the last live roses from a nearby bush and walked ahead of me. The grave had been dug by hand, no doubt Mrs. MacLeod’s work, and the casket rested on two sawhorses. It was silver, metal, with airline shipping stickers still clinging to it. I was surprised. You always think of ornate coffins, organ music, that kind of thing. But my mother was going to be buried in what she’d blown into town in from the Omaha morgue. That was fitting, I guessed.
Simon placed the rose on the lid of the coffin, his pale hand resting next to it. “My sister always loved the outdoors. She loved this spot, high on the rocks. Looking out over everything. Loved music, loved animals, loved her life. Right up until she got sick.” He looked at me, his eyes red behind his glasses. I knew my eyes matched his, in spite of my best intentions not to shed one more tear over her. “Did she pass any of that on to you, Ivy?”
I shrugged. “We moved around too much to have pets, like I said. We didn’t even have plants.”
Simon sighed. “I thought as much. I wish I could ask my sister why she did things the way she did.”
“Not much mystery there,” I muttered. “No offense.”
Simon lifted his glasses off the bridge of his nose, rubbing the red mark. “I wish I knew why she turned against us. She and I were close, especially after our mother . . . well.”
“Also went crazy?” I supplied.
Simon winced.
“I’m sorry,” I said instantly, my stomach knotting for reasons that had nothing to do with the coffin a few feet away. Usually I had a better sense of when I’d crossed the line with a mark. Maybe that was the problem—Simon wasn’t a mark; he was family. I wasn’t supposed to read him and figure out how to manipulate him into telling me secrets and giving me all his cash to supposedly get in touch with his dead relatives. That wasn’t how normal families behaved. It wasn’t my uncle’s fault I didn’t know how to be a part of one.
“Mom really messed up,” I said. My throat was tight, burning. I could still taste that metallic, overfiltered bathwater.
A strong wind caught the rose, and it slid off the coffin, slamming into the ground and scattering its petals over the muddy turned earth. “She wasn’t happy,” I whispered. “But at least all that’s over now.” I sucked in a breath, looked at Simon. He was holding it together, but his cheeks were wet, and his shoulders trembled. I knew from watching other people’s grieving families that he was about two seconds from losing it. So I got control of my own shaky voice and spoke in the smooth, unruffled one I’d practiced over and over, and told the biggest lie I’d fed Simon yet.
“I don’t know what happens after this,” I told Simon. “But I hope wherever she is, she’s at peace.”
Simon swiped at his cheek with a gloved hand and slid his other arm around me, squeezing my shoulders with that surprising, wiry strength of his. I didn’t pull away—I didn’t even have to hold myself still. I was glad for the support. We lingered silently while Mrs. MacLeod used the winch on her Jeep to lower the casket the rest of the way into the grave. Simon picked up a handful of dirt and threw it on the casket. I did the same. Then it was over.
Simon poured himself a mug of coffee the moment we were back in the kitchen and filled his mug to the rim from a bottle of supermarket bourbon he pulled from the back of a cabinet. He took a swig, winced, and then tipped the bottle to an empty mug, looking at me. “Ivy?”
Normally I’d have been jazzed to have an adult offer me booze, but it just felt wrong, Plus, it was barely 10:00 a.m. “I’m good.” I said. “But I will take coffee.”
“I know that you don’t feel much now,” Simon said as he handed me coffee and went back to sipping and wincing between sentences. “But when it eventually hits you, you can talk with me, or I can arrange for you to speak with someone else. A professional.”
“I don’t need grief counseling,” I said sharply. I’d held it together in the cemetery, but if Simon kept going over and over this I was going to lose it.
“I have no doubt your anger toward Myra is justified,” Simon murmured. “But she’s dead, Ivy, and holding that bitterness now only hurts you.” He drained his mug. “There’s a saying: resentment is like taking poison and expecting the other person to die. Whatever she did . . .”
I lost it. I couldn’t keep quiet another second. Weirdly, it was because Simon had been so good to me, last night when I broke down and today at the funeral, that I started yelling, words barely separated by breathing. He was a truly decent person. He didn’t deserve the illusion about his sister, that she was damaged but basically okay. That the person he’d loved was still alive in her in any way, shape, or form the day she’d killed herself.
“She tried to kill me!” I slammed my mug down, coffee sloshing all over the kitchen table. “She wasn’t confused or just angry. She was so calm when she did it. She held my head under water in a bathtub, and I think she regretted not going through with it every day after, because she never treated me like I was human again, much less her daughter.” I was shaking, body and voice. I’d never been this honest with anyone, and it was terrifying. “You’ve treated me more like family in the past week than she did in sixteen years.”
Simon stared at me, eyes unblinking behind his glasses. I shut my own eyes, waiting for the yelling to start, for the rage I’d seen the other night. He’d call me a liar, a troublemaker, want to know why I had to stir up drama. Why was I ungrateful? How dare I speak that way about his dead sister?
I jumped when arms wrapped around me, but I didn’t fight. Simon pulled my head down onto his shoulder, his free hand rubbing my back. “I’m so sorry, Ivy,” he whispered. “I had no idea.”
I sniffed hard. I’d had enough of crying over Mom, but I couldn’t stop. “I knew she was sick, but you have to believe if I had an inkling she’d tried to harm you, if you’d ever contacted me for help, I would have taken you in years ago, no questions asked.”
“I do,” I said very softly. For all his awkwardness and temper, I really did think Simon would have helped me. It wasn’t his fault Mom had kept me hidden.
“I am so very sorry,” Simon whispered.
I pulled back, using the hem of my shirt to wipe my face. “It’s okay, Uncle Simon. It’s not your fault.”
“I can’t change the past,” he said. “But going forward, maybe you and I can give each other what we didn’t get from our family until now. I want you to stay here, Ivy. Not just until high school is over. I want this to be your home. You can go to college all expenses paid, make a life for yourself—if not on Darkhaven, at least close by. Let me do that for you.”
“Uncle Simon,” I said. My voice was rough from the yelling and the crying. “You don’t have to overcompensate. Really. We’re good.”
He managed a real smile this time, not a robot smile. “You’re a good kid, Ivy. I know you haven’t heard that much, but I mean it. I’m very glad you came here.”
Even though we’d just buried my mother and I’d finally told the worst secret I’d ever kept, I felt strangely light. I wasn’t holding everything so close anymore. I’d dropped a tiny piece of the baggage Mom had left me. I smiled back at Simon. I actually meant it too. “It doesn’t totally suck here,” I allowed. Simon barked a laugh.
“That’s my girl. Why don’t you go wash your face and relax? If you have homework, just tell the school you were sick on Monday. I’ll back you up.”
I didn’t argue. I was exhausted, like I’d run around the entire island a dozen times. I went back upstairs, changed into sweats, and after a moment of debate, shoved my clothes from the funeral into the trash can next to my desk. I wasn’t going to wear them again.
I went to root around in the fridge as night fell, but Mrs. MacLeod loomed out of her apartment and stopped me. “No snacks before supper,” she said. I caught a glimpse of a tight studio off the kitchen, with a hot plate, a twin bed, and, miracle of miracles, a sleek white laptop sitting on a small desk. Just as I was about to ask if she’d let me use her Netflix account, she slammed the door and locked it with a fat skeleton key.
“So the whole ‘my mother just died and today was her funeral’ exception isn’t gonna cut it with you?” I asked her.
“We’ve all lost, miss,” she said. “All you can do is carry on, and part of that is sticking to routine. Indulge yourself once, and you’ll be indulgent right along, any time the slightest wind shakes your boughs.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “Just what exactly is your problem with me?”
Mrs. MacLeod shrugged. “Where do I begin? I didn’t care for your mother either.”
“In case you hadn’t noticed,” I hissed, “I’m kinda going through something. So maybe back off the anti–Mary Poppins routine for one day, okay?”
Mrs. MacLeod bared her teeth slightly. “Rude. Like mother like daughter, I suppose.”
“You have no idea what I’m like,” I snapped. “So instead of being awful, why don’t you take up a useful hobby, like renting yourself out at Halloween to scare kids?”
“You . . .” Mrs. MacLeod started to reach for me but stopped when Simon came into the kitchen.
“Could I speak with you privately, Ivy?” he said.
“You could be about to give me the Talk, and it’d be better than this,” I said, rushing to put him between Mrs. MacLeod and me.
Simon guided me to the door of his office and slid it open. Inside, it looked pretty normal, if you were either a big fan of scary movies or Hannibal Lecter. Bones, human and animal, were everywhere. The animals and people were displayed on bases or strung together with thick black wire and hung on the wall. Birds flew in ghostly formation from the ceiling. Behind a giant desk that was carved with all kinds of mythical creatures across the front, taxidermy heads that still had their fur studded the deep red wallpaper.
“It’s a little much,” Simon said. “My grandfather was a biologist and a big-game hunter. He collected most of these. Before he lost it and committed multiple murders, obviously.”
I felt my shoulders pull in as I followed him around the desk to the wall, feeling dozens of empty eye sockets and glass eyeballs on me. Any way you looked at it, displaying the prey of a guy who’d gone insane and massacred half a dozen people was both incredibly tacky and unbelievably macabre.
“The state requires that I sign a few documents relating to finalizing my guardianship,” Simon explained, sitting himself behind the desk. He was way too small for the giant thing and still looked like a little kid playing with his dad’s stuff. “I just wanted to make sure I had all your details correct.”
He wrote with a fountain pen on a stack of forms while I rattled off my social security number and our last address in Omaha. A clanging sound came from the kitchen, and Mrs. MacLeod bellowed. “Simon! Telephone for you!”
Simon winced, heaving a sigh. “Once in a great while, I miss the days when my mother reigned supreme and insisted that the help didn’t holler at you from other rooms.” He pushed back from the desk. “Wait here, I won’t be a minute.”
He was gone a lot more than a minute, and I got bored and started wandering around the office, touching all the taxidermy. It was creepy, like touching too-realistic stuffed animals, and I thought I’d really screwed myself when I touched a snowy owl mounted on the wall and its head halfway came off.
“Crap,” I whispered, trying to push the piece of foam back onto the rest of the body. I stopped when I saw a spring-loaded latch inside the owl where its foam core should be. I twisted the head all the way to the left.
One of the panels of wallpaper whispered back and into the wall, leaving a small open passage behind the desk.
“No way,” I whispered, peering into the small gap. I expected something spooky, dripping with moss and moisture, or sticky with salt like the cave at the beach, but instead a set of stone steps led down into the darkness, and the brick wall was clean and free of any sinister lichens or drawings of demon goats or 666 diagrams.
I grabbed one of the ever-present flashlights that were all over the house from the top of Simon’s desk, snapped it on, and stepped onto the top stair. I didn’t even wonder if I should be doing this—I was definitely investigating any hidden passages I stumbled across.
The steps went down a long way, deeper than a basement, into a long room held up by arched brick columns. I saw the shadow of huge granite blocks above. I was looking up at the bones of the manor house, and I shivered at the faint sound of water droplets echoing from somewhere in the dark.
My light picked up the edge of a circular stone well. It was too perfect to be natural, circular and wider than a hot tub, and I saw faded chisel marks on the stone: BLOODGOOD 1726. Great. Creepy-ass Connor was probably the last person to come down here.
I dipped my hand into the gently lapping water just below the lip of the cistern. It shocked me, so cold it almost burned at the tips of my fingers. It was the kind of cold things only get when they come from some place so deep and dark nobody has ever laid eyes on it.
“Ouch,” I muttered, flexing my fingers to get the blood flowing again.
I stepped around the cistern and looked into the beam of my flashlight. It illuminated a flat slab of the same flaky white stone the entire island was made out of under the thin coating of trees and sand. This one had flat black markings carved into it, rough ragged lines that looked like scars more than anything.
I fidgeted. This place made me feel like I had ants crawling all over me, a sensation that I couldn’t shake off.
“Ivy!” Simon’s voice echoed off the ceiling, made me jump a foot.
“Down here!” I called, and watched the bobbing light of Simon’s electric lantern as it came down the steps.
“Ivy, for the love of Pete,” he said. “This is not safe. There are quarry holes down here that go fifteen feet deep. Come upstairs this instant.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, pointing to the rock. “I was just looking at this.”
“The altar rock,” Simon said. “The first inhabitants of the island used it to worship, to mourn, and to celebrate. Connor built the house over it, hateful sort of man that he was. Superstitious idiots would probably say he thought he’d draw some kind of power from it.”
“Yeah, this place is giving off a real Amityville vibe,” I said.
Simon snorted a laugh. “Come upstairs. All that’s really down here is that cistern, and the water in it is terribly tainted. You’ll be seeing colors and hearing voices in no time if you ingest it. Who knows, maybe that’s what made Connor go batty.”
“You sure that isn’t what messed up Mom and my grandmother?” I asked. He shook his head.
“Connor’s son dug a new well, and so far so good.”
He turned to go back up the stairs, and then glanced back. “Ivy,” he said hesitantly. “The tunnels connected to this cellar run clear under the island. Any map that may have existed is long gone, but one could still find their way with enough time.” He raised the lantern so it dazzled my eyes. “I need to know: Did you see Neil Ramsey the night he died? Did he find the route to this cellar and come inside the manor? If he tried to hurt you, Ivy, I’d understand. I wouldn’t be angry.”
He stepped toward me. I took a corresponding giant step back. Suddenly he wasn’t my nerdy uncle. He was a guy I barely knew, and we were alone in a place where nobody would hear anything, no matter if I whispered or screamed.
My pulse was vibrating so hard it felt like someone was squeezing my throat shut. He knew. He must have found the shirt somehow. He’d followed me into the woods and seen . . . what?
“I don’t know anything,” I whispered. Fortunately it was dark, because I was way beyond controlling my microexpressions or keeping eye contact to sell the lie.
“Ivy, it’s very important that if you start to have any . . . urges you tell me immediately,” Simon said. “If you did something, even if it was an accident . . .”
“I didn’t kill Neil Ramsey, okay?” I shouted. My voice rolled back to me through the narrow space. “I’ve never been down here, and I didn’t hurt anyone.”
I felt sick and dizzy, like all my lies might choke me. I didn’t know that I hadn’t done something. If my brain was as defective as all the other killers and freaks in my family tree . . .
I turned, whether it was to run or just curl in on myself I wasn’t sure, but my foot caught a rock and I pitched forward, over the edge of the cistern.
The cold water felt like being hit by a car. My lungs seized up, and for a long second I sank, unable to move. Then survival instinct took over, and my legs started kicking of their own volition. My head broke the surface, and I choked and screamed, a big mouthful of the water making its way down my throat. It tasted heavy and earthy, almost medicinal, and it burned a little on the way down.
Simon was yelling—I couldn’t tell what, from the water sloshing and my blood roaring in my ears. His hand grabbed my collar and yanked me from the water. I landed on the dirt floor, coughing and shaking.
“Ivy.” Simon’s voice was getting farther away. “Ivy!”
I tried to crawl toward him. The rock under my hand gave the slightest of vibrations in response, and I started to feel prickles of electricity working their way through my fingers and up my arms. The vibration spread, the rock rumbling like a heavy truck had passed by, and I heard a faint hiss growing from behind me. My eyes slowly adjusted, and I realized there was a small bit of light coming in from somewhere above me, just barely enough for me to make out shapes. A pale cloud rose from the cistern, and I felt hot steam. The water—the frozen water—was boiling, hissing and sloshing over the sides of the pool that held it.
The shaking increased, and I felt the same kind of breathless feeling, that sensation of being perpetually perched at the top of a roller coaster, rush through me. I tried to reach for Simon, but when I did, he wasn’t where he’d been standing, the strobing light from above showing I was alone. “Simon?” I called. “Simon!”
Rock screamed on rock in response, and I heard something collapse off in the dark. Panic did start then—what if I was trapped down here?
The water hissing and churning drowned out everything, even my own heartbeat, and all at once I wasn’t at the top of the coaster—I was plunging over, free-falling as something gripped me just like it had when I’d dreamed I was in another body. I was only a passenger inside the vessel of my body, and I felt a scream building inside me.
Stop! I shouted internally. This has to stop! All at once, like the ride had crashed back to earth, the shaking ceased. I still felt floaty and disconnected, but this was different from the dream—I was still a passenger, but at least I could steer. I hoped I wasn’t dead. I’d died enough for one lifetime.
I made myself stand up and felt my way along the rock wall. I’d seen light—that much I was sure of, and light meant a way out. Doyle had said the tunnels all ended at the beach, where the bootleggers would transfer their cargo to small boats bound for the mainland.
My knuckles scraped along the rough granite, leaving my blood behind, and I kept stumbling on the uneven ground, but I managed to stay up. I wouldn’t say my thought process was anything approaching clear, but I managed to put one foot in front of the other until I stepped from the rocky passage into a dim, chilly cavern. The light I’d glimpsed was coming in from a crack high above, and I could only hear wind, not waves. I must be farther inland, somewhere deep underground. I slumped to my knees when I realized there was no way out, no way to reach that light. The walls were smooth, like the inside of a genie’s bottle, the chimney tapering until it truncated in a crack barely big enough to reach my fingers through.
I smooshed my knuckles into my face, trying to massage some feeling back into it, and when my vision cleared a little I saw the faint light from above gleaming off something small and gold in the corner of the cavern.
I crawled over to it slowly. Moving at all still felt like I was inside a particularly shitty carnival ride, and my head throbbed like someone’s jacked-up bass. The gold thing was a ring—one of the big chunky ones guys loved to show off, even if they’d graduated from high school twenty-odd years ago and were now selling tractors in Topeka. I reached out for it, the metal stinging my fingers with cold, but when I picked it up something skinny and white came with it, and clattered out of my grip against the rock.
I shoved the ring in my pocket and scratched at the gravel, hoping what I was seeing wasn’t real, just like the boiling water or the sounds, or me missing the fact Simon had vanished, but the skeletal hand practically grabbed mine as I freed it from the ground.
That wasn’t the end either—attached to the hand was an arm bone, still encased in some kind of disintegrating plastic jacket. I dropped it, gravel biting into my palms as I scrambled backward, until my wrist twisted and I landed almost face-to-face with a human skull.
In my panic, all I really saw was the dry, stretched flesh clinging to the cheekbones like cheap leather clings to an old suitcase, and the straw-soft pale hair sticking to the scalp. The skull rested against a rock, like the dead person had just lain down for a nap, and on the flat surface above it, in a dip carved by the lava that had left these tunnels, sat a small gray figure, faceless and made of a material just as rotted as the corpse’s clothes. Some sort of little doll, a grotesque parody of the dead person who’d ended up just below it.
I ran, falling like I was drunk, back through the passage. My lungs wouldn’t draw enough air to really scream, or I would have been yelling until my vocal cords gave out.
Half running, I tripped over a corner of that damn altar stone Simon had been so excited about and landed on my face. Things went blurry and black, like when you chase a Valium with a mouthful of cheap drugstore vodka, and I blacked out for a second.
Wakefulness crashed over me like a bucket of cold water. I started into a sitting position and vomited, managing to mostly avoid Simon’s shoes and my own legs.
“Ivy?” Simon gripped my shoulder, holding my hair out of my face and running a hand across my cheek. “Are you all right?”
I shoved him away. “How could you leave me alone down here?”
Simon stumbled onto his butt on the rock, eyes widening behind his glasses. “Ivy, I’ve been looking for you for an hour! I never left the cellar!” He stood, brushing off his pants. “I came down here to tell you the cellar isn’t safe and you took off running like a bat out of hell. I’ve been practically having a stroke yelling for you down every tunnel in this place.”
“NO!” I yelled. “You left me,” I rasped. My throat burned from throwing up and the screaming beforehand. “You left me down here with a dead fucking body!”
“Ivy,” he said, offering me a tissue, “you hit your head. I have been trying to find you, and I did not leave you—you ran from me in a panic. Calm down before you really hurt yourself.”
I snatched the tissue and wiped off my face, glaring up at him. My muscles ached from the fall, from running through the dark, stumbling blind. I’d be lucky if I didn’t get hypothermia, given how I was soaked through with water . . .
Except a touch told me my jeans and shirt were bone-dry. Underwear and bra too. I was dry right down to my socks. The only dampness was a sheen of panic sweat coating my face and sticking hair to my neck.
“I’m so sorry,” I muttered. Simon held out his hand, and I let him pull me up. I was shaky, but I made myself stand on my own. I don’t know if I was falling back on my tough act because I was freaking out, or because I didn’t want Simon to know just how off the rails I’d gone.
“I’m sorry to ask, Ivy, but . . . are you taking any drugs?” he said. “I won’t be angry, I just . . .”
Now not only my head but my entire body ached, and I sat down hard on the edge of the old altar rock. “I’m not,” I sighed. “Even back in Nebraska I never did much more than smoke a little pot or steal pills from whoever Mom was seeing that week.”
Rather than tsking or acting like he was disappointed in me, Simon lowered his head. “I was half hoping you’d say something you ingested could be causing this,” he murmured. “Ivy, you really frightened me. And what’s this about dead bodies?”
“It’s . . .” The memory of that cavern was so real, the feeling of the smooth, cool finger bone rolling between mine vivid as the pain in my shin from where I’d tripped. And fallen into the water, which hadn’t happened at all.
“Simon, did you . . . did you warn me about the well water?” I said carefully. His brows drew together.
“Other than saying don’t drown in it?” he said.
I waved the comment off, my heart sinking. “Never mind.”
Everything I’d seen when I was blacked out before seemed real.
My mind wasn’t the go-to source for reliability right now, anyway. When I looked to where the gap in the wall had been, the light leading to the cavern, there was nothing except smooth rock. Whatever had caused this, I wasn’t in any shape to keep exploring a bunch of caves, so I let Simon help me up.
“Come on,” Simon said, taking me by the hand like I was five. “Let’s get you cleaned up. I may have to call Julia and take you to the emergency room if you’ve hit your head badly.”
I faced Simon as he shut the hidden door to the tunnels and brushed off his hands. “I want to know everything. All the signs, how long I might have if I’m sick. I want to go to a real hospital and get a brain scan or something.”
Simon looked reluctant, but then he nodded. “There are a lot of other things that could be causing this, Ivy. A lot of explanations for the things you thought you saw in the basement that made you run from me.”
“Whatever,” I said. “I just want to figure out if this is my fault or not.” I scuttled upstairs and shut my door, propping the chair from my desk under it. I didn’t think, I just moved. Instincts ingrained since I was a little girl kicked in, and I slumped down on the floor next to the chair, my heart pounding. It’s not an easy thing to admit you’re sick. Everyone pretty much goes through life assuming they’re fine, until they’re not. And even when you hear the word schizophrenia or Parkinson’s or cancer, you want to deny it. Bullshit psychics and healers would go out of business if you didn’t.
I wondered what I’d hear when I saw a doctor or a shrink.
I wondered if it would make me remember anything about Neil Ramsey, the lighthouse, the “dream” where I’d cut my foot. I couldn’t remember, but clearly that didn’t mean much. I was for sure losing time. I was running around caves, hallucinating skeletons. Who said I wasn’t capable of anything when the black curtain came down over my memory?
I made myself get off the floor after a few minutes. I was sixteen, not five, and way too much crap had already happened today for me to spend the rest of it hugging my knees and shaking.
I showered and shoved the clothes that I’d been wearing to the bottom of my laundry bag. They smelled overpoweringly musty and dank from the cellar. I couldn’t feel that I’d even lightly tapped my head, never mind bruised it after examining myself in the mirror for cuts. I must have keeled over in a faint down in the basement. I was a fainter now. Awesome.
Flopping on my bed, I took out the small book I’d found in my mother’s room and riffled the pages again. Her handwriting was spidery and dense, like trying to read through a thicket of pricker bushes. She had serial killer handwriting, and didn’t really believe in spaces.
Doyle would know what to do, I realized. I rolled off the bed and slid into my boots and my jacket.
The sun was almost down by the time I left the mansion. The rosebushes were mostly naked, just a few brown leaves and dead flowers clinging to their branches. They rattled in the wind, trying to snag my jacket and my hair as I walked to the forest. By the time I got back to the stream the moon was up. Flashes lit the clouds spotlight white for a few seconds at a time before it got dark again, blotting out everything but the indistinct skeletons of the pines.
An eerie wolf howl cut through the woods on the wind, and I sank deeper inside my coat. Obviously, there were no wolves in Maine. Especially not on a tiny island. I was just letting myself get wigged out, substituting the things I was rightfully upset over with stupid crap like wolves and monsters. The me of six months ago, before all this started, would have laughed her butt off at me skulking through the woods, afraid of shadows.
Doyle’s house was mostly dark, but I knocked on the back door anyway. After what had happened, having a run-in with Doyle’s father suddenly scared me a lot less.
The porch light flicked on, and a guy who looked a lot like Doyle, just bigger and meaner, opened the door. “Yeah?” he grumbled.
“Um,” I said. He was huge—like club-bouncer huge. Pro-wrestler huge. I tried not to stare.
“Doyle!” the guy bellowed. “The Bloodgood girl is on our porch, bothering me!”
“Oh, you can go back to eating protein bars and injecting hormones into your butt cheeks,” I told him with way more bite than was probably prudent, given how ’roided out he looked. “I can show myself in.”
“You got a problem?” the giant demanded. Fortunately Doyle came thundering down the stairs into the back hall before I could tell this guy what exactly my problem was, and probably end up swallowing a few of my smaller teeth for my trouble. I could only feel sad and scared and off-balance for so long before I just started wanting to lash out at anyone near me. It was one of my less charming traits, but there you go. I hadn’t exactly had an awesome role model for anger management with Mom.
“You’re a dick, Blake,” Doyle grumbled, taking me by the wrist and pulling me inside and down the hall. We were in his room before I could blink, and he slammed the door. “Are you crazy?” he demanded. “You know how jumpy my family is right now. The last thing they want is one of the Bloodgoods at their door. You’re just lucky Dad is on the mainland.”
“Do you want me to leave?” I asked. The floor creaked outside the door, and Doyle growled.
“Go away, Blake!” he shouted. He pushed a pile of laundry off his bed and gestured. “Sorry. I don’t clean much. Or ever.”
“I’m still getting used to the idea of a room where all the furniture isn’t bolted to the walls,” I said. “My standards are insanely low.”
Doyle flopped back on the ratty patchwork quilt and grinned up at me. “Lucky, lucky me, then.”
I didn’t join him, choosing a seat in a ratty easy chair in the corner. Girlfriend, boundaries, et cetera. “This is okay, right?” I said. “Valerie won’t be pissed I’m in your room?”
“Valerie doesn’t have any say over who I hang out with,” Doyle said. “Plus, I’m being honest, it’s not like we’re gonna get married. She’s heading to college in a few years, and I’m staying right here. It’s fun while it lasts, but she made it pretty clear it’s temporary.”
I pulled my knees up to my chest, feeling kind of crappy for how happy Doyle’s words made me. I did have a little bit of a thing for him, and just because I’d never act on it while he was with someone else didn’t erase it. But for right now he was off-limits, and I wasn’t exactly in a flirting mood anyway.
Doyle sat up, bouncing a little on the creaky bed. “So what are you doing here, anyway?”
I got to my feet and started looking through the stuff on Doyle’s dresser. Suddenly I didn’t know what to say. “It just got kind of intense at home.”
Doyle stopped bouncing and tilted his head. “Must have been a little bit more than intense if you’d risk coming over here. Not that I’m mad you did. If nothing else, you have more balls than most of my family. Or yours, for that matter. They all act like they’ll be burned at the stake if they’re caught on the wrong side of the island.”
“It’s a lot harder than I thought being here,” I said. “My mom’s house. Her room. Her stuff. Seeing what she was like before is . . . it’s weird. And my fucking uncle—he has the nerve to tell me that, oh yeah, we’re all sick in the head apparently, and we tend to die prematurely and take anyone close down with us. Bonus, no modern medication works and no doctor is even entirely sure what’s wrong with us.”
I slumped back down on the easy chair. “I know nothing is set in stone, but I’m scared. I haven’t admitted that since I was, like, eight years old, but I don’t want to hurt anyone. And I don’t want to lose my mind like my mother apparently did. I don’t want to spend half my adult life in a psych ward. I just want to move to California and just . . . live an entirely normal life. That part’s lame, I guess, but I . . .”
“Not lame,” Doyle broke in. “Where in California?”
“San Francisco,” I said.
Doyle reached up to a wall of photos, postcards, old ticket stubs, and similar items littering the wall above his bed and handed me a dog-eared postcard showing an expanse of desert and blue-gray mountains rising into an indescribably clear sky. I recognized it without looking at the caption on the back as New Mexico.
“Farmington,” he said. “That’s where my mom ended up after the divorce. Sometimes when this island feels really small I look at that and pretend I can go out there after high school.”
“Can’t you?” I said.
Doyle shook his head.
“Dad would cut me off, and I don’t exactly have scholarship grades. We’re not Bloodgood rich, but all my cousins get college paid for, cars, living expenses. I can’t just show up on my mom’s doorstep with no college plans and no job skills. Dad made sure she got absolutely nothing when she left him. I don’t want to be a burden.”
Much as I hated touching people, I kind of wanted to hug Doyle. He looked so deflated, the usual spark burned out in his eyes. “Farmington is nice,” was all I could offer. “I think you’d be really happy there.”
“Yeah,” Doyle sighed. “Basically, anywhere is better than Darkhaven. But you didn’t come over here to listen to me bitch and moan. Tell me what’s going on with you.”
I pulled the notebook out of my pocket. “I found my mother’s . . . diary, I guess? I don’t know. It’s literally the only thing I have that might tell me why she ran away. My uncle just keeps saying there were problems, and she left.” I tapped the book against my leg, suddenly irritated. “I don’t know why it’s such a big secret. She sure as hell never tried to protect me from anything. I mean . . .” I tossed the diary on the cot. “It’s clear as day she was already nuts, and she was like what, seventeen?
Doyle picked up the book and paged through it, scanning the pages of scrawl in the five different colors of ink. “Why don’t we ask her friend?”
“What?” I grabbed the diary back. “My mother did not have friends. She had people who tolerated her until they realized she was a kleptomaniac con artist.”
Doyle leaned down and ran his finger along a line of scribbles. “Mary Anne. Says right there.” I leaned over his shoulder as he read it aloud, envious of his ability to decipher Mom’s scrawl.
Went with Mary Anne to the lobster bake. She brought her dad’s schnapps. My dad won’t stop asking me what Mom said last time I visited her in the latest glorified prison ward he had her locked in. I just want to float away, feel like I did when I was warm and dizzy and standing with my toes in the ocean on the mainland. You can’t go into the water out here on the island. You’ll drown.
“Even if this Mary Anne exists, I bet she’s long gone,” I said. “This was, what, nearly eighteen years ago?”
Doyle took the diary and flipped rapidly. “Mary Anne’s dad, the one with the super-sad liquor cabinet, lives in Camden,” he said. “That’s not too far. We should go.”
I raised one eyebrow. “Are you serious? In case you didn’t notice, we’re stuck on an island and my uncle’s weird little minion is the only one with a boat I have access to.”
“She’s not the only one,” Doyle said. “Meet me tomorrow morning around six and we’ll take my dad’s cabin cruiser.”
“Won’t your dad be pissed you stole his boat to go look for a teenage alcoholic who may or may not have been friends with my mom?” I said.
“Oh yeah, he’ll kick my ass,” Doyle said. “But it’ll be worth it. I don’t like seeing you this worried.”
“Yeah, let’s go.” I locked eyes with him. “I could pretend I’m not worried, but I am, and I need to know, and I really don’t want to go alone.” I made myself stop talking. Now I was just spilling all my fears and feelings to anyone who’d listen. I needed to get it together.
“So we’ll go together,” Doyle said. “Six a.m. There’s an old dock on the other side of the lighthouse that nobody uses. I’ll pick you up.”
I almost thought he was more nuts for suggesting I wake up at 6:00 a.m. than we go track down Mom’s friend, but I nodded. “Okay.”
“And if you feel the urge to kill, let me know, so I can get a head start running,” he called as I opened his bedroom door and stepped into the hall.
“I hate you,” I said. Doyle grinned.
“I’m adorable and you know it.”
“Now who’s delusional?” I said, and shut the door.