Betty and I had fun at the movie, at least I thought so. It was a tiny theater, the seats smelled like decades of dust and creaked when I moved. I laughed in all the right places, although watching Betty react to the movie was more fun than the actual film, which I’d seen before with PJ, in between us watching his Dario Argento collection for the twentieth time. After, Betty’s father picked us up out front, Betty and I squeezing into the front seat of his pickup.
Mr. Tyler was silent as we drove, a tall, skinny guy with a couple of days’ beard, dressed in dirty work clothes. I wondered where Betty got her chattiness from, considering aside from saying hello her father literally hadn’t spoken. I started when he did speak as we pulled into the flat gravel parking space next to the Tylers’ trailer. “So, Ivy,” he said. “Where are you living?”
“I . . .” I considered lying, but Betty would just rat me out. “I live on Darkhaven Island,” I said. “Simon Bloodgood is my uncle.”
Mr. Tyler stared at me more closely as he unlocked the door and let us inside. The trailer looked like a dingy time capsule, everything that had been inside it in 1960-whatever when it was built still in place. “You’re Myra’s daughter?” he said. It was my turn to stare. Suddenly the avocado wallpaper and the plastic furniture were the least interesting thing in my vicinity.
“You know—knew my mother?” I corrected myself.
“Yup,” he said. “We’ve spent some time away, but I grew up right here in Darkhaven. Just down the road.”
“Daaaad,” Betty sighed, opening the fridge and taking out the kind of soda that has all the caffeine and sugar left out. “Ivy doesn’t want to hear about that.”
“No!” I said quickly. “I do. I don’t know much about my mom’s life here.”
“Myra was a good girl,” he said, surprising the heck out of me. “I mean, we were all trouble back then. Me, her, our whole group of friends. Your uncle was the only straight arrow in the bunch. But I’m glad to see Myra straightened out and had a family. You look like her.”
I tried to smile, feeling my throat tighten up. “Thanks,” I managed. I didn’t know what else to say. It wasn’t my job to burst his bubble about Mom.
Betty handed me a soda and tugged on my arm. “Come on, Ivy,” she said. “Dad let me put the TV in my room because you’re company. We can watch Cheers and Bewitched and . . .”
“Elizabeth, she’s barely gotten her coat off,” her father said, laughing a little. “Why don’t I make you two some popcorn and you can settle in?”
Not for the first time since I got here, I realized I hadn’t judged somebody correctly. I saw Betty’s dad and assumed he was basically the same as Mom and most of the people I knew back in Nebraska—blue collar because they had to be, mostly focused on getting enough cash to get wasted and not have to work for a few weeks. The Tylers clearly weren’t that. They were nice people, normal people, a functional family from what I could see. Poor, sure, but Mr. Tyler clearly worked his ass off making this trailer livable—it was the cleanest, neatest mobile home I’d ever been inside. There were no overflowing ashtrays, no empties in the kitchen sink, and no clutter anywhere. It reminded me of the tidy main cabin of a ship.
Betty’s “room” was a tiny space behind a plywood partition and a folding door, but it was cozy and decorated with fluffy pink everything. “This is nice,” I said, trying to find a place for my stuff amid all the sequins and satin.
“I made all of it,” she said. “The curtains and the duvet and everything.”
“Wow,” I said, meaning it. “I can’t sew or anything. It’s cool you can.”
“I learned because we don’t have any money,” she said, still smiling as she turned on the ancient tube TV with a remote the size of a sandwich. “If I want to look nice, I have to buy things at the thrift store or make them. I got tired of being teased where we lived before, so I taught myself to sew, and sometimes I go to the swap meet and sell stuff I find to help out Dad with bills. He works construction and he’s gone all the time, so I have to make sure to buy groceries, and if a bill comes when he’s not here, I pay it.”
I sat on the edge of her bed as she flipped channels, the TV fizzing. “That sounds rough,” I said.
Betty cut a sharp glance at me, the first I’d ever seen her give. “I don’t want your pity,” she said. “I know I’m poor. It’s a fact of life, and it is what it is.”
I held up my hands. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Obviously you have it handled.” I thought about telling her about my life before Darkhaven, but I didn’t want to come across like I was one-upping her. I’d always hated that game when I’d been the one with the thrift-store clothes who lived in a trailer.
We watched Cheers in the longest silence I’d ever had around Betty. Finally the microwave beeped in the main room and Mr. Tyler knocked at the partition. “Popcorn, girls.”
“Come in,” Betty said, muting the TV. Her dad handed over a bowl of popcorn and then looked at me.
“Do you need anything, Ivy?”
I smiled my best parent-pleasing smile. “I’m fine, thank you. You’ve been a very good host.”
“It’s the Christian thing to do,” he said. “Besides, Betty speaks very highly of you.” He started to leave, and then turned back. “If I can ask, since you’re in my home—do you have a personal relationship with Jesus?”
I felt my embarrassment at my prejudgment and my gaffe with Betty ease a little. There was always one weird quirk to even the most normal-seeming people. I guess all the talk about Mr. Tyler and his fundie leanings wasn’t totally off base.
“I’m good,” I told him. “Jesus and I are tight.” I glanced at Betty, crossing my fingers she wouldn’t rat me out.
“Good,” Mr. Tyler said, seeming more relaxed. “No later than midnight, girls. Sleep well.”
Betty didn’t last until midnight, falling asleep and snoring lightly. I curled up on my side of her bed after I shut off the TV, watching branches weave shadows on the trailer’s ceiling as moonlight streamed in. I usually never had trouble sleeping in strange places, and tonight was no different.
I bolted awake some time later. Betty’s clock, which was shaped like a pink plastic heart, glowed on her nightstand, reading after 2:00 a.m. I blinked, trying to figure out what had woken me. Wind whined around the trailer’s curved walls, shaking it down to its foundation. The shadows on the ceiling twisted violently, seeming alive.
All except one. The shape was an indeterminate height and gender, but it was definitely a person, near enough to the Tylers’ window that their shadow had crept inside.
I breathed in, out, slow, trying to ground myself, digging my fingers into the edge of Betty’s cheap mattress so I could feel something real. I guessed I’d spoken too soon about the hallucinations. I couldn’t let on what was going on, and I didn’t know what would come next, so I stayed frozen, watching as the shadow got longer.
The person was moving, closer.
“It’s not real,” I whispered out loud. “It’s not there. Make yourself not see it.”
I kept up the mantra, and it kept moving, until a crack from the other room made me squeeze the mattress so tightly I bent back a fingernail. I knew the sound of an air pistol anywhere.
“Hey!” Mr. Tyler bellowed from outside. “I see you! You come around here again and you’ll get more than a pellet in the backside!”
Betty jumped beside me, waking up. “Dad?” she called. I heard the outer screen door of the trailer bang, the inner door slam, and a bunch of locks clicking.
“It’s all right!” Mr. Tyler called back. “He’s gone.”
He opened the door to the bedroom, still holding the camo-painted airsoft pistol. “You girls okay?” he said. Betty rolled her eyes.
“Put the gun away, Dad. What is going on out there?”
“Prowler,” Mr. Tyler said. “Probably those damn kids from the other side of the park, excuse my language.”
I wasn’t so sure. The shadow had been out there for a while. That wasn’t kid behavior. That was stalker behavior. I had the bad, bad feeling that whoever they were, they weren’t out there because of the Tylers.
“You actually saw him?” I said. “The person?”
“Saw the back of him,” Betty’s dad grunted. “Just track pants and a hoodie. He’s lucky I didn’t see his face, or I’d be out there running him down.”
I exhaled long and slow. It had been real. I was still in the clear.
Of course, now I had to handle the fact there had been somebody out there watching me, in all likelihood. I wondered if one of Liam Ramsey’s creepy clan was keeping tabs on me.
“Are you all right, Ivy?” Mr. Tyler asked. Betty also laid a hand on my arm. “You don’t have to be scared. I’ve got plenty more guns that don’t just shoot pellets, and I’m a light sleeper.”
“I’m not scared,” I said. That was the first non–white lie I’d told the Tylers—had to be some kind of record.
Mr. Tyler nodded and backed out of the room, and Betty flopped down, turning the light out. It took me a long time to fall back to sleep—until it was light out, and the shadows were gone.
Betty asked me again at breakfast if I was all right—I wasn’t hiding my jumpiness very well. It had been nice to get off the island for a while, but now I wanted to go home. I turned down Mr. Tyler’s offer to go to church with them and told him I’d be ready to go whenever he was. Betty looked down, pushing her cereal around in her bowl.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just didn’t sleep very well last night even before the prowler. I was doing more research into that Children of Cain thing you helped me translate from the old journal and it kind of freaked me out.” That was better than letting on I was pretty sure somebody was following me around, creeping on me when I was asleep.
Mr. Tyler turned sharply from the mirror over the kitchen sink, where he was tying his ratty tie at the collar of his church shirt. “Did you say ‘Children of Cain?’”
I nodded hesitantly, worried I was about to earn a Bible lecture or possibly just be thrown out of the trailer.
Mr. Tyler frowned. “What’s your interest?”
“It’s research,” Betty said quickly. “For our independent study. Local history.”
“You know about the group in the eighties,” Mr. Tyler said, not a question.
“A little,” I said.
“I assume your project is focused on the disappearances,” Mr. Tyler said. I raised an eyebrow.
“Disappearances. Right. You know, newspaper stories we found are vague. Anything an actual local knows would be really helpful.”
Betty cut me a look, a small grin on her face. I was just lucky she thought my ability to spin bullshit on demand was cool, and not a sign of sociopathy.
“Four of the five people in the commune disappeared from Darkhaven Island in 1985 and were never found,” Mr. Tyler said. “I was just a kid when it happened, but my father was involved. He was chief of police.”
I felt a small ball of nerves form in my stomach. Another island secret Simon hadn’t told me about. Maybe it was just an honest omission, but those were starting to add up to something deliberate.
“Could I talk to your dad?” I asked. “It would be helpful.”
“He’s dead,” Betty piped up. “He had cancer. And a stroke. And he smoked all the time.”
“The only one still around is the guy who made it off the island,” Mr. Tyler said. “And I wouldn’t go looking for him if I were you.” He picked up his jacket from the back of their sofa and indicated the door. “Let’s get you to the dock, Ivy. Unless you’ve changed your mind about attending service.”
I declined politely, again, and got my stuff. At the dock, Betty got out of the truck with me. “I’m sorry everything at my home is so crappy,” she said. “I know after this you probably won’t talk to me anymore, so I have to say it now before—”
“Betty,” I said. “My mood has nothing to do with staying at your trailer.”
Her expression perked up. “Really?”
“Really,” I said. “I had a nice time. I’ll see you tomorrow at school.”
“Okay!” she said. Her father honked, and she started for the truck but turned around and ran back to me. “If you really do want to know about those commune people, you should ask Bob Brant. He’s my cousin. My aunt is my dad’s sister, so she got married and they have a different last name, but he totally knows all about all of Grandpa’s old cases.”
“Officer Brant?” I said, holding up my hand to stem Betty’s verbal tidal wave. She stopped and took a breath.
“Yes. His first name is Robert but he goes by Bob. Never Bobby.”
“We’ve met,” I said.
Mr. Tyler honked again, and Betty waved at me. “I have to go. Good luck, Ivy!”
I looked down the dock at the empty slip where Julia’s boat was usually tied up. I looked back across the street toward the main cluster of Darkhaven buildings, including the police station and the courthouse.
I knew what I was going to do even as I jogged across the street and started up the sidewalk. I’d made the decision to find answers, even if I didn’t like them. And it was clear to me there was something dark about my family’s island, something that gathered tragedy to it like a magnet. Thirty years ago four people had vanished without a trace. My great-grandfather had massacred the Ramseys. My mother had gone mad there. And now Neil Ramsey was dead, and near as I could tell, somebody was following me, on Darkhaven and now the mainland.
Maybe I was fooling myself that I could use one to make sense of the other, but I’d tried lying my entire life, and it had gotten me here. I needed to know what was true about my uncle, my family, and the island. Then I could figure out what to do next.
The cop at the front desk glanced up when I opened the door. The police station was tucked into an annex of the courthouse, and the waiting room was tiny, barely bigger than a walk-in closet. A window of cloudy bulletproof glass separated us. “Can I help you, sweetie?” she asked through the little speaker grill.
I tried to smile and tamp down my instinctive reaction to cops, which was hostility tinged with a desire to run. This was definitely the first time one had called me “sweetie” and meant it.
“I’m looking for Officer Brant,” I said. She shook her head.
“He’s working nights this month, hon. He’ll be on at seven.”
Hon. That was also a first. I must have showed the strain of keeping a pleasant look on my face because she sighed, giving me a pitying stare.
“Is this about the school outreach program?”
I nodded, hoping it was the right answer. She reached for a card, scribbling on the back of it. “He said if anyone from his at-risk group came around to give them his home address. Are you all right? Do you feel safe right now?”
I accepted the card she slid through the slot at the bottom of the glass. “I’m not in crisis,” I said, borrowing a phrase from one of the many ER shrinks who’d seen my mom. “I just really need to talk to him.”
Brant lived in a tiny wooden house on a street of almost identical houses—everything about the street screamed quaint, from the pocket-sized lawns to the wind chime hanging on Brant’s porch, swaying in the cold breeze trickling off the harbor.
I rang the bell, and when that didn’t work I started knocking. After a few rounds of my fist on the weathered wood of the door, Brant opened it, staring out at me with bleary eyes. “Ivy?” he said, surprise waking him up. He was wearing pajamas and a faded Darkhaven High tee.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “This is going to seem really weird, but I need to ask you about a case your grandfather worked.”
“Come in,” he said, stepping aside. His house had that obsessive neatness that only a certain type of young single guy possesses. Everything in its place, nothing decorative, muted colors, almost as generic as a motel room. A gun safe in the corner of the living room was the only off note.
“Want some coffee?” Brant asked.
I shook my head. Keyed up as I felt, caffeine was the last thing I needed.
“So what’s up?” Brant said, pressing buttons on a silver machine that whirred and dispensed espresso. The smell of the grounds filled the air.
“I’m really sorry to come here like this . . . ,” I started.
Brant held up a hand, wincing as he sipped the jet-black coffee. “It’s my job to help you out. You and anyone else in Darkhaven who needs it. You said it was about an old case?”
“The Children of Cain,” I said. “The four people who went missing in 1985.”
Brant sat opposite me on his sofa. “Let me guess,” he said with a laugh. “Betty?”
“She said you knew your grandfather’s cases,” I said.
Brant nodded. “I got all his case files when he died. I became a cop because of that, really. More than to follow in his footsteps. He was pretty much every bad thing you can imagine about a small-town chief. But some of the stuff in those files is dark. I figured I owed it to the town to try to do better.”
“Somebody died on the island recently,” I said. “And I just . . . I . . .”
“Neil Ramsey’s death was ruled accidental, Ivy,” Brant said. “You have nothing to worry about. And if anything happened to those hippies, my grandfather never proved it. It was a lot easier to disappear in the days before computerized records.”
“I’m not worried,” I lied.
Brant gave an approving nod. “Good. Stay away from the Ramseys, and you’ll be fine. They’re the real problem on that island. They’ve been on the wrong side of the cops since way before my grandfather’s time. That Doyle kid who goes to school with you and Betty is the only one without an arrest sheet.”
“There are a lot of stories,” I said. “About the island, about my family. The cult thing too.”
“Look,” Brant said. “I can give you the case file if you really want it, but I’m afraid it’ll be boring compared to the stories. There’s witness statements, and some background on the people who went missing, and that’s about it. There weren’t many people to interview—just the Ramseys, and your grandparents.”
“My grandmother?” I felt my head go up. Brant nodded, getting up and going to a bookshelf stacked with old cardboard file boxes. He ran his hand across the labels, pulling out one labeled DARKHAVEN ISLAND ’85 and blowing dust off it.
“Ivy,” he said, handing it over. “Take it from me—people in small towns love to gossip, and they’re cruel a lot of the time. Whatever people are saying about your family, all that’s there is a lot of tragedy. You don’t have anything to be ashamed of.”
“My great-grandfather did hack up six people with a hatchet,” I said.
Brant checked his watch. “That’s not your fault, though. I’m going to go for a run. Feel free to stay here and read that file.”
I sat back, opening the box but waiting until Brant came back from his room in shorts and a hoodie and headed out the door to start reading.
He had been right—the case file was slim. The statements took up the bulk of it, and I read through the Ramseys’, which basically amounted to eight versions of “we didn’t see nothin’” and hesitated before flipping to the first page of my grandmother’s. It had been retyped, but I could imagine her posh elocution, the kind that nowadays only exists in old movies, dripping off every carefully chosen word.
I did not know the campground residents well, but never noticed any untoward activity. I take daily walks on the advice of my doctor and they would always be sociable and friendly when I passed their campsite. One of them even carved a rattle for my daughter, Myra, and often asked after her. They were a quiet and courteous group, and I never saw anyone else at their camp.
I thought back—in the summer of 1985 my mother would have been a little under a year old. It was weird to think about her as a baby. Simon wouldn’t even have been born yet.
I hadn’t been to the campsite in several weeks when Mr. Ross appeared at the manor, asking to use our phone. My condition had deteriorated again, and I was on strict bed rest. Mr. Ross appeared upset but coherent, and while we waited for the police to arrive from the mainland he expressed his sympathies for my illness and even apologized for inconveniencing me.
I dug through the box, and found the name in the main file—Peter Ross. The one person left at the campsite. His witness statement was just an empty folder, with a note clipped inside—Interview File #22565.
I went through the rest of the box but there was nothing else. I went back to Brant’s bookcases, until I found another box marked 1985 that was full of half-mildewed crime-scene photos and reel-to-reel audiotapes. Even for the eighties, the technology was ancient. Darkhaven was lagging behind the times way back when, too, just like the island and the manor. I pulled the reels with the right file number and shoved them into my jacket pocket, then replaced the box, careful to line up the edge exactly with the dust line on the shelf.
I was back on the sofa with the paper files when Brant banged the door open, damp from the fog outside. “I’ve got a boat,” he said, taking a bottle of water from his fridge. “I’ll run you home—my shift doesn’t start until seven p.m.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I really appreciate all your help.”
“I appreciate you spending time with Betty,” he said. “That poor kid needs a friend.”
I felt the tiniest bit of guilt for stealing the tapes from Brant, but only the tiniest bit. “It’s no problem,” I said. “I’m not exactly winning any popularity contests myself. I get it.”
Brant changed and drove us back to the marina in his civilian car. His boat was smaller and way less fancy than Doyle’s, but it got the job done, and we were back at the dock on Darkhaven just as the sky was starting to get pinky-orange from the impending sunset. It was getting dark earlier and earlier—soon we’d have barely eight hours of daylight.
“Ivy, you really can’t put too much stock in what people say about your family,” he said. “They’re just stories. Strip away the ghosts and all you have are people. People are flawed, but they’re not evil, and if anyone tells you that you are, they’re wrong.”
“Thanks,” I said, climbing out of the boat. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
I watched the boat leave and climbed up the hill to the manor. Brant was a nice guy and obviously thought I was a little bit of a lost soul in need of guidance, but he didn’t know me. I wasn’t worried about what other people whispered about my family. I cared about what the members of my family were telling me—or weren’t.
The manor house was always dark, even when it was still daylight, and I missed that there was someone standing just inside the door, and screamed when Simon shouted at me.
“Where the hell have you been?!”
Simon looked angrier than I’d ever seen him. “I said be home by noon!” he yelled. “It’s practically sunset, Ivy!”
“I’m sorry,” I said, holding up my hands. “I just decided to spend a little more time with Betty, and we lost track of time.”
Simon grabbed me by the upper arms, squeezing to the point where it hurt. “I was worried, Ivy! You can’t just ignore my rules!”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, quieter. This was not the Simon I’d come to expect. I didn’t know what to do—I couldn’t get away from him, and I couldn’t make him less angry.
“You can’t do that to me! It isn’t okay for you to just do whatever you want. I tell you to be home at a certain time for a reason!” Simon shouted. I flinched away, and he finally let me go.
“I think you should go upstairs,” he said. “I’ll have Veronica bring you dinner.”
“Okay,” I whispered. I felt tears blooming just behind my eyes, and I wasn’t entirely sure why. It wasn’t like I’d never gotten screamed at before.
“Ivy,” he said as I reached the kitchen door. I turned, and he pulled a plastic bag off the coat hook by the door, taking out a thin white box and tossing it on the table. “I went to the mainland yesterday and did some shopping. I’m going to be in New York this week, meeting with the manager of the Bloodgood trust, and I’d appreciate it if you keep that on so I can reach you.”
I picked up the smartphone box without a word and practically ran up to my room. I shut the door behind me and felt my heart pounding against my ribs.
Maybe Simon really was just worried about me, but I’d seen the same look in his eyes when he’d lost his temper at Mrs. MacLeod. He hadn’t been worried because I hadn’t checked in. He’d been pissed off at being defied.
If I was going to keep sneaking around on Simon, I was going to have to come up with an ironclad cover story.
I curled up on my side facing the wall. I was still shaking. I’d gotten used to laid-back, soft-spoken Simon. His rage had more than surprised me; it had actually scared me. I didn’t like being scared. It made me feel like a helpless little kid again.
I jumped when Mrs. MacLeod knocked, and swiped at the tears on my cheeks before I opened the door. She came in without a word, holding a tray with a bowl and a sandwich on it.
“Thank you,” I said, sitting up and trying to smooth down my hair and look like I hadn’t been crying. Mrs. MacLeod grunted as she set down the tray and then squinted at me.
“He means well,” she said at last.
I sighed, really not in the mood to hear Simon apologia. “Seeing as I’m stuck in here until school tomorrow, could I just eat my dinner?” I said.
Mrs. MacLeod surprised me by putting a hand awkwardly on my shoulder. “You’re lucky,” she said. “He’s willing to be patient with you. He’ll forgive and forget. Don’t push his kindness too far, miss. Take it from one who’s known him since he was a boy. Forgiveness isn’t in his blood.”
She left, and I stared after her, suddenly not all that hungry. Still, chicken soup and a PB&J was probably the most normal food I’d been served since I got here, so I took advantage and ate.
I tried doing homework and sleeping, but it was a nonstarter. I was still up when the sky started getting light, and I heard the Jeep grumble away, taking Simon to the boat. I was going to get up and go for a walk, but I felt the tape reels I’d taken from Brant in my pocket when I reached for my jacket.
A house this ancient and stuffed with junk had to have a reel-to-reel player somewhere. I took the tapes and went hunting in the library, I found a player with a bunch of other obsolete technology stacked on a shelf below the grim family photos that adorned every free space of wallpaper.
I plugged the player in and perched the old-school padded headphones over my ears. I threaded a tape, glad I’d paid attention when PJ went on about all his old sound systems and the reel-to-reel demos he collected of unknown punk bands. Static hissed for a few seconds, and then a gravelly voice with a thick Maine accent spoke.
“Chief Tyler interviewing Peter Ross, July 27, 1985.”
There was a sound of chairs scraping, breathing, the clicks and buzzes of the tape. It was in bad shape, wrinkled and dusty, and crackled as it fed through the player.
“Peter, tell me what happened,” said the chief. I heard a shuddering intake of breath, and then a young voice spoke. It surprised me how young—he didn’t sound any older than guys I went to school with.
“I woke up and my brother and Steve and our buddies Fred and Lance were just gone,” he said. “I already told all this to the other officer.”
“Tell me,” the chief said. “Because, frankly, a lot of what you said isn’t making sense.”
“Their sleeping bags were empty,” Peter said. “There was blood. Blood on the grass, blood on their sleeping bags. Their packs were gone.”
“See, this is where we run into a problem.” The chief sighed. “We’ve had men out to that island, dogs, we even got the state police to fly over with their helicopter.” The tape clicked. “There’s nothing there, Peter. No blood. No sign anyone but you had been there.”
“They wouldn’t just disappear,” Peter muttered. “Not my brother. He wouldn’t leave me.”
“Son,” Chief Tyler said. “You five come up here from the city, you stay a summer, you don’t cause trouble, that’s fine. But I know what kind of people you are, and I’m not surprised your friends packed up and left. Telling stories won’t change that.”
“I saw the blood,” Peter insisted. “I know something happened. Ask Mrs. Bloodgood! She saw us. We talked, a lot.”
“You and Mrs. Bloodgood,” Tyler said. “What’s going on there? Lonely woman, all on her own, husband always off in New York.”
Peter’s voice was much steadier and harder when he answered. “Nothing like that happened. She’s all alone with a new baby, she had a complicated pregnancy, and she didn’t have anyone to talk to. I gave her a recipe for some herbal tea my grandmother and my mom used when they had babies, and I let her talk to me about how she couldn’t have any more kids and how it made her feel. That’s all. You want to insinuate, that’s your problem, man.”
“So you woke up, and your friends were gone,” Tyler said, abruptly changing tones.
Peter sighed. “I told you. I woke up; they were gone. There was blood everywhere.”
“And you didn’t see or hear anything before? You slept like a baby?”
“We heard plenty while we were camped out there,” Peter said. “All kinds of weird noises in the night. People stealing shit from our camp. I just figured it was those redneck pot farmers on the other side of the island.”
“Those folks aren’t your concern,” Tyler said. “We haven’t found any evidence of lawbreaking. We haven’t found anything. And unless you’re going to be honest, and have more to back you up than some hysterical housewife doped up on painkillers sitting in that big house, then I’m either gonna close this case, or I’m gonna arrest you.”
“You don’t understand,” Peter said, his voice cracking. “There’s something out there. Something on that island making us—”
There was a sharp crack, and I jumped. The tape snapped, broken end flapping, and the rest of the reel crumpled up in the machine, chewed to shreds.
I sat back, not sure what to think. Who knew what drugs that Peter kid was on, who knew what he’d seen? I couldn’t deny what was on the tape, though. My grandmother had been his friend. Close enough to talk about her health, my mom’s birth.
About the fact she wasn’t having any more children.
What did that make my uncle? Maybe it was all bullshit, maybe Peter was a serial killer and my grandmother had just been oversharing because she was lonely and all by herself with a young child.
I went to the kitchen to make some coffee, only to discover that the jar of instant was empty. I opened the fridge to find a bottle of juice with a Post-it stuck on the front that read IVY, next to one of those packaged granola-and-yogurt breakfasts. It was better than nothing. After a sleepless night, my mouth was sandy and dry, and I gulped the juice. I was going to get ready for school when I smelled the smoke.
It wasn’t a bad smell, just sharp, and I followed it back to the library, where I saw the small blond girl I’d seen before standing in front of a roaring fire in the library’s head-tall fireplace. The walls around her were empty, the squares where the photos had been darker against the evergreen-colored wallpaper. She stared blankly into the flames, tossing another handful of photos in, the black-and-white images crumpling and flashing different colors as the chemicals burned off the paper, erasing the faces.
“Hey!” I said as she tossed in a formal portrait of my mom and Simon, taken in front of the doors of the manor.
She turned to me. I took a step back and tripped over my own feet. Her dress was white and covered in blood, so much that it soaked the fabric and dripped onto the thick Persian rug.
“Look what you made me do, Ivy,” she whispered, guttural and low, like nails scraping across wood. She advanced another step, as the thick gray smoke began to billow, filling the room. “Look what you made me do!”
I jolted awake, falling off the library sofa and slamming my elbow hard on the wooden table. The reel-to-reel machine tumbled to the floor, the ruined tape flapping.
It was full daylight, the photos were on the wall, and the fireplace was cold and unlit, a layer of ash and dust telling me it hadn’t been used in years.
“Well, your uncle is off to the airport,” Mrs. MacLeod said, bustling in. “Are you . . .” She took in my face and the machine lying on the floor. “Christ almighty, Ivy. You can’t just go around breaking Simon’s things.”
“I tripped,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I did the thing where I just told myself none of it mattered—not that I’d had another nightmare, or hallucination, or whatever, and that meant I wasn’t getting any better. Not that I’d been listening to a stolen piece of police evidence. Not that I was starting to wonder if anything Simon had told me was the whole truth.
All that mattered was I had tripped, I was sorry, and otherwise I was fine.
Mrs. MacLeod grumbled. “At least he hasn’t used this thing in ages.”
I helped her pick up the reels and the headphones, trying to put the scattered pieces of the player back together. “You’ve known my uncle a long time, right?”
“Since he and Myra were small,” she said. “Ten and eight. And before you ask, yes, he was always as particular about his things as he is now.”
That wasn’t what I’d been asking, but whatever. I spotted the photo I’d watched burn in my dream hanging on the wall with the others, and looked at it more closely. Simon and my mom were wearing tennis outfits, posed with their rackets, even though Simon’s arm was in a cast and my mother looked like she’d rather be anywhere else.
“Fourteen and sixteen,” Mrs. MacLeod said. “Simon was nationally ranked until he broke his arm. Poor thing had to have three pins put in. He was so disappointed. His mother bought him that tape machine to take the sting out of having to stay in and recover all summer. He collected old recordings, could never listen to them until she hunted down that player. She did spoil him so.”
“Was that before or after she got sent to a mental institution?” I said. I wasn’t in the mood to hear Mrs. MacLeod’s happy-time stories of days gone by.
“Between visits,” she snapped back. “Get dressed. You’ll miss the boat for school.”
I did as she said, wanting to be off the island. I had charged the phone Simon had given me, and I played with it on the boat ride over, setting it up and putting in Doyle’s number. I had to take advantage of the freedom of my uncle being in New York. I had to visit my grandmother and figure out what was going on there, ask her about Peter Ross and all of it.
Then I’d know. I’d be back in control, the one who knew what was really going on. Then I could decide what to do, and maybe stop having this sick feeling in my stomach that had nothing to do with the rolling of the boat taking me to the mainland.