THEY WENT OUT into the bay, sailing as they had done the day of the regatta: Pearl trimming the sails, Tristan at the helm. They didn’t speak much. It was a relief, not having to do anything but read the changes in the wind and watch the water spread out before them.
They passed Little Nicatou. It was impossible not to imagine Bridges and Cassidy meeting there, maybe sitting on the lip of the boathouse as Pearl had done with him that morning. Telling each other how they felt, touching for the first time. Pearl thought of Bridges’s white, agonized face this morning, pleading with her to keep his secret, not to ruin everything. Watching Tristan’s back, she couldn’t say if it was guilt bothering her, or maybe, deep down, a case of wounded pride. Was she that petty? Was she really upset because it turned out that Bridges had always controlled what they shared, using her to fill the hole left by a girl whose act Pearl could never hope to follow?
The wind pushed them northwest, into open water. The rain started to spit faster, speckling Pearl’s face and lashes; she put up her hood. The sky had gone from patchwork to solid oyster gray.
Tristan locked the wheel into autopilot and came forward. “If you want a rain jacket, I’ve got some below.” He paused. “We could have a drink. If you’re interested.”
She shifted, glancing up at the sails, the telltales fluttering. “We’re okay to leave her for a second?”
“It’ll be fine. Nothing out here but waves.”
He held the cabin door for her, and she ducked under his arm, aware of their closeness as they started down together. Telling herself she wanted this, that uncertainty was all a part of it.
Pearl leaned against the galley as Tristan withdrew a bottle of port wine, something she’d never drunk and wasn’t sure if she wanted to. But she was tired of holding glasses as props, setting things on coasters and hoping that nobody would notice. Tristan poured her a finger’s worth and handed her the glass, saying, “You don’t seem like much of drinker,” as if her thoughts had been broadcast.
She found she’d lost her taste for lying. “No. My dad’s got that covered.”
Tristan took his own glass, sipped. “He’s got a problem?” His eyes were calm, no judgment to be read in them.
“I guess so.” She checked herself. “Yeah. He does. I didn’t used to think so, but—” But Reese had always known and never pushed her on it. That got her thinking of their phone call, of Indigo’s hands smoothing Reese’s clothes. She wouldn’t dwell on that, not this afternoon. “I think he’s finally figuring out that he needs some help.”
“You’ve been running things at home for a while, haven’t you?” When she looked up, surprised, Tristan shrugged, finishing his drink. “It’s your personality. Efficient. Responsible.”
“Wow. I sound like a party waiting to happen, huh?”
Tristan gave a rare smile, tucked it away. “You’re reliable. You know the Yeats quote, ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.’ You’d never let that happen, if you could help it. It’s not a bad thing.”
“Thank you. And thank you for assuming I know Yeats.” Another twitch at the corner of his mouth. “Hey, two smiles in one day. I must be doing something right.”
He looked at her. Then he leaned in, lowering his face to hers. She closed her eyes as he brushed his nose and lips over her temple, into her hair. He held his face there a long moment, breathing her scent, but he didn’t kiss her, not yet. His hand slid up her side, over her shoulder to stroke her neck, and then he pulled back, still close enough that she stood under the shadow of his bent head, the smell of port rich and sweet. “I’ll go up top, make sure we’re still on a good heading. Be right back.” He went to a closet and pulled out two rain jackets, leaving one laid over the galley counter for her as he went up the stairs.
Pearl smoothed her hair where he’d touched her, exhaled shakily, then took her glass over to one of the settees. The port was heady and powerful, not bad at all, and she sipped as she waited for him, reaching out to brace herself as the boat gave an unexpected pitch. When she sat back, her gaze landed on a footlocker under the opposite settee and lingered there.
The lock was very small, the steel catching the gleam of the lamplight. Her hand lowered her glass slowly, mechanically, setting it on the chart table.
Her bag hung over a coat hook on the wall. Tristan’s word—reliable—flitted through her mind, how she’d been considering telling him everything about Dad. I don’t know if you heard about the caretaker. . . . But she was going for her wallet now, popping open the coin purse and shaking out the keys.
Pearl knelt and tried one of the keys in the lock. It fit. She dragged the footlocker out the rest of the way and opened the lid.
Not much inside. Some traveler’s checks, registration papers proving ownership of the boat to one David Garrison. A small snub-nosed pistol and a box of cartridges, for protection, presumably. And a yellow-and-black digital camera in a waterproof case.
Pearl glanced at the cabin door, her heartbeat insistent against her chest; he’d be back any second. She picked up the camera, examining it. It didn’t look like something that would’ve belonged to Cassidy. It had only a few simple buttons, and there was a sticker on the case from a cartoon popular with the middle school set. She remembered the video of Cassidy sneaking up on Joseph, him grabbing for her camera, Cassidy laughing—Mom says you can’t use it unless I say so. Sometime between then and last August, Joseph had gotten his own camera.
She turned it on. It had both picture and video capability. The few pictures were of nothing, blurry selfies of Joseph and some friends, giving peace signs or hanging upside down from tree branches. A surprise-attack shot of Cassidy sitting in the grass with a book, smiling, her eyes closed.
Pearl didn’t have to look any farther than the last video recorded. Water sounds, a close shot of a weathered board with a row of action figures straddling it. Joseph’s voice, low, deepened for play: “We’ve found their hideout . . . follow me.” His hand came into the shot, walking Captain America along the board, then diving him into a plastic crate of beach toys. This went on for some time, and Pearl forwarded through the scenes until the shot shifted.
Joseph had moved to the space between the boards, still filming, the camera badly off center. A cockeyed view of the Garrisons’ private stretch of beach was visible, and so was Tristan, standing along the tree line, hands in his pockets, his back to where Joseph hid in the Roost. A man stood with him, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, a cigarette in his hand. Pearl recognized him, though the sight of them together made no sense, had no place in the world as she understood it.
Tristan and Evan Sanford, Yancey’s son, continued talking, whatever was said too far off to be caught by the microphone. After they parted without a handshake or much of a good-bye, Evan went up into the trees, following some unseen trail. Tristan turned and began making his way back, lifting his head. Catching sight of his brother, and the camera.
There was a scraping, fumbling sound as Joseph moved, his knees sliding over sand-covered planks, backing toward the ladder. The last thing the camera caught was a flash of Tristan coming toward him, walking faster, gaze locked on the Roost.
When Pearl looked back, the cabin door was open, and he was there, as she knew he’d be, his jacket beaded with rain. Holding his gaze, she slowly lowered the camera into the box.
Tristan came down the steps, pushing his hood back. He stared at the footlocker for a long moment, considering what was inside. “You watched it.”
“I wasn’t . . .” She shook her head. “I didn’t. I was only looking at it.”
He walked over. “I never thought to check in there. I guess I just . . . stopped seeing it.” His tone was slightly unbelieving, the idea of something not occurring to him so novel that he didn’t even seem perturbed. “David kept those keys in the lockbox at the house in the off-season. They should’ve been burned. Where did you find them?”
She didn’t answer, instead getting slowly to her feet. “We should go back now.” Her words were like stones in her mouth. “It’s raining harder.”
A slow, chiding tilt of his head, and it was all laid bare between them, at least as much of it as she understood. Her legs faltered as she backed into the chart table; she grabbed the settee for support. “I don’t even know”—now her words were dust, her tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth—“it’s just a video. I—”
“Pearl.” In a sigh. “You should not have watched that.”
Panic trickled in, quickening, becoming a flood. Her gaze slid to the cabin door.
“It’s okay. Really. I’m almost glad it was you.” He stepped forward; she stepped back. “If somebody else had to find it first, you should be the one. I’ve been looking . . . for months. They didn’t really know what they had, so it stood to reason that they hadn’t hid it all that well.” A slight lift of his shoulders. “I was wrong.”
She opened her mouth, but a choked sound came out first, not words. “You did it.” Horror, then, a sickening blow. “You had him do it.”
“Hold still.” She kept going. His eyes widened slightly. “Stop moving away from me.”
Pearl dodged and ran, the steps and door twenty feet away, fifteen—he caught her around her waist and slung her back, slamming her into the edge of the galley counter. Then he was on her, shushing her, her cry smothered by his hand. “Stop it. Pearl? Stop it, or I won’t let you breathe.”
She thrashed against him, blows bouncing off his chest and shoulders. His hand moved to cover her nose, sealing off everything. She was still hitting, trying to bring her knee up to force him back, the roar of panic smothering everything, blurring the room in static and noise. He was still talking against her ear, nonsense sounds, until some instinct finally kicked in and she went prone, knowing only the heat of his palm and her starving lungs.
“Shhh. Like that.” He sighed again, as if mildly put out, adjusting his grip so that one of her nostrils was free. She had to cough but couldn’t, instead sucking at the pitiful stream of air. “I’m going to let go now. Can you control yourself?”
She nodded once. He released her, stepping back. Pearl gasped, stars bursting across her vision, edging down the counter away from him until she hit the wall and could go no farther. Her eyes were still watering, and she swiped at them. “You’re pretty good at that.” Her voice shook. “Get lots of experience with your sister?” He kept observing her, his eyes as still as polished obsidian, catching the lamplight. “She recorded you. Breaking down the door to get to her.”
He lowered his head slightly, gaze traveling the row of liquor bottles. “That must’ve been the day she hid it.” He moved away from Pearl, staring into the footlocker for a second before shutting the lid with the toe of his shoe and pushing it back underneath the settee. “She told Sloane that she was going to the Islander to make one of the videos for her site, but she must’ve brought both cameras. I followed. Too late, apparently.” His tone was vague, musing. “Protecting the little brother.”
Pearl watched him, not sure if this was shock, the numbness that spread through her, the feeling of detachment from this moment, this place. She saw the gate around the Garrison house. Not trying to keep someone out—trying to keep someone in. “Everybody thought it was David.” Her voice was a husky whisper. “You let them think he was the monster, making everyone afraid. But it was you. You were the one.”
Tristan absorbed this, slowly shaking his head. “He was the monster.”
The boat gave another tilt; glass tumblers slid together with a musical clink. Her gaze went to the cabin door; too far away, he’d be on her in a second. And she wasn’t giving him any excuse to take her air again. She talked fast, words coming nearly on top of each other. “Your brother and sister were scared of you. Weren’t they? You went after Joseph to get the camera back, but Cassidy helped him, hid it from you. They didn’t need to know why it was so important. Just that you’d hurt them to get it.”
“You’re not trying to understand.”
Gooseflesh, nausea, washed over her. “He killed them. He burned them.”
“And I told you. I carry that with me, all the time.”
A confession as they’d danced, mistaken for grief. “How awful for you.” Eventually, more words came to her. “How did you even find him?”
“Offer enough money, you can find someone to do anything. Something like this . . . you can’t leave a digital trail, bank transfers. The police will find it. You have to be meticulous. I can be that.” He picked something up from the magazine rack—a tube of lip gloss with a sparkly label. Cassidy’s. “He’d done time while he was living in Illinois. Manslaughter. I told him what I wanted. He should’ve been able to do it.”
It took Pearl a second to find her voice again. “You must’ve let him in. While your family was at the club that night, before you left to go up north. He was already in the house.” That was why Dad never saw any footprints by the fence, why the home protection system never went off until it detected smoke.
“He was supposed to kill the watchman. It was the best way to let the fire burn, to destroy everything. But he didn’t.”
Because Dad was Yancey’s friend. He’d been coming around the Sanfords’ house for years, since Evan was a kid. Whatever atrocities Evan had been willing to commit inside the house, when he’d recognized Dad, he hadn’t pulled the trigger. Pearl shut her eyes for a moment, released a trembling breath. “God. They were your family.”
Tristan stopped walking the lip gloss through his fingers, dropping it back among the New Yorkers and Architectural Digests. “They weren’t.” He turned to her. “David and Sloane Garrison were self-serving hypocrites who treated their children like trophies. I was always the one David chose. To crush. To try to break down.” He exhaled slowly, through a clenched jaw. “Cassidy was their automaton. Joseph was their pet. All I wanted was to be free of them.”
A gust of wind slatted rain against the portholes. The stained-glass lamp swayed on its chain, casting red and yellow dapples of light across the teak paneling. “Are you free now?” He didn’t answer her. She was sweating slightly, taking slow steps toward the cabin door. “That’s not what I see. I think it’s tearing you apart. I think that’s the real reason you didn’t leave town. You couldn’t stand to leave what you did. You’re grieving.” She shook her head, disbelieving. “You never expected to feel anything, did you?”
Tristan’s fingers curled, released. He closed half the distance, tension spooling between them. “Stop moving. Don’t make me hurt you more than I have to.”
She hesitated, swallowing an acid taste. “You’re going to have to.”
Pearl ran. He was faster, agile, blocking the path to the door, making her wheel around—she shoved over a storage container, strewing the contents in his path. The only place left was the head.
She ran inside, slid the catch home, spun to face the tiny room, full of a sickening understanding of things already done, scenes played out. As if in slow motion, she went for the cupboards under the sink—there must be a weapon, something Cassidy hadn’t thought of—then screamed as the door was slammed from the outside.
It took only two hard kicks. The gold catch—weakened from last time—exploded. Pearl lunged forward, going nowhere, only wanting to escape his hands. But he had her, grabbing her hair and shirt, heaving her forward into porcelain and a gradual, yielding darkness.