Meredith
Present Day
“I don’t even know what happened.”
“I can’t remember—”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I can’t… Agh, my head… No, it’s fine. I’m fine. I said I’m fine.”
“There’s an ambulance on the way.”
“Hit me in the back of my head. There was someone at the door, but it was dark.”
“Looks like someone smashed the porch light.”
At this last statement, Meredith finally looked up from the table where she’d shredded a paper towel, her fingers working, furious. “Smashed?”
The cop, one of two standing around her kitchen not doing a fucking thing, nudged a piece of plastic with the toe of his shoe.
“Don’t touch it!” Meredith screeched, the words like knives down her throat. “Aren’t you not supposed to touch things? How will they find her? How will they find my kid?”
“Ma’am…” This from the lady cop, all warm smiles and there, theres. Meredith hated her. “Your daughter needs you to be calm right now.”
“You don’t know fuck-all what my daughter needs. My daughter needs me to find her.” Meredith stood, knocking over the chair.
Art flinched. “Meredith…”
“And don’t you say a goddamned word to me,” she snapped. Why was everyone so fucking calm? Why were they just standing there? Who was out looking for Alice? What if—
No. God. She couldn’t go there. Not yet.
Maybe she was hiding. Maybe she heard the person beat the shit out of Art and escaped somehow. Alice was smart. No, she was brilliant. She was Meredith’s daughter. She would’ve figured it out and run. Meredith had to believe that.
The lady cop righted the chair and placed one hand on Meredith’s shoulder. “Ma’am. Please. Can I make you some coffee or something?”
Meredith sat but only because the strength in her legs was temporary. She was freezing, still in her damp clothes. The lady cop had tried to get her to change, but what would that help? She had to stay exactly like this. Exactly how she was when… She squeezed her eyes shut, counting breaths. If she stayed put, kept everything the same, she could stop time. Everything would pause, and she would be able to figure out what happened. To find Alice.
“Whatever,” she muttered.
She heard the crunch of tires on gravel.
The first cop, Nosehair as Meredith referred to him in her head, pulled the curtain aside. “That’ll be the detective. Looks like the ambulance isn’t too far behind.”
Seconds later, more blue and red lights flashed through the window.
“I said I was fine,” Art said. “I don’t need an ambulance.”
“We just want to be sure,” the lady cop said, setting a steaming mug of black coffee in front of Meredith. She felt the judgment in the gesture. You’re drunk, and your kid’s gone. What kind of mother are you?
Nosehair let the detective in, who introduced himself, giving a name that flitted in and out of Meredith’s head without her catching. She didn’t care what his name was.
“If you’re here,” she said, “who’s out there looking for Alice?”
The detective’s calm expression didn’t even crease. “We have several deputies combing the area. You gave Officer Martinez a photograph?”
The lady cop nodded.
“Good. That’s a good start.” He sat across from Meredith, angling the chair so he had Art’s full attention too. “Let’s start from the beginning.”
She bit back a nervous laugh. The beginning. Where was that exactly? Yesterday on the beach? Or earlier? When she left the cape? The first time her mother got trashed and demanded things of ten-year-old Meredith that made no sense? If they wanted, she could dig even deeper. She could tell them about the women who came before. Her grandmother Diana. Bethany, their namesake, who sacrificed her legs because she said the ocean told her to. Grace, who threw herself out of her own window to get to the water where her mother, Regina, had disappeared. What about the other girls? Regina’s first daughter and a cousin or niece who disappeared from this very fucking house?
Her head suddenly felt very heavy. We really are cursed. A whole line of disappearing—dead—women. She thought of her mother and a new wave of grief washed over her. It wasn’t supposed to be Alice next.
“It was supposed to be me,” she said under her breath.
“Sorry. What was that?”
She sat up, wiped her eyes. “I was out.” Memory and suspicion sloshed in her head like murky water. “I went to a bar in town.”
The detective whipped out a notebook. “Which bar?”
She told him.
He nodded like he knew the place. “Anyone see you there?”
Heat ripped through her gut. “I left with a woman.”
“Get her name?”
Face burning, Meredith shook her head.
“How about the bartender? How’d you pay? Cash? Card?”
“Credit card.”
“Great. That’s great. We’ll alibi you right away and we can move on. What time did you get home?”
“Alibi nothin’,” Art interjected. “Meredith wouldn’t hurt me or her kid. I told you already it wasn’t her.”
“We’re only doing our job, sir.”
Art snorted, spraying blood. “So were the SS.”
The idea that she might hurt Alice made her feel sick. If anything, the only person she’d wanted to hurt… No. She couldn’t even finish the thought. She hadn’t wanted to hurt anyone. But she did. Might have.
She gave some vague estimation of the time. She had no idea. “When I walked in the door, I found Art on the stairs. Alice’s room was empty. All smashed up.” Her voice caught.
The lady cop squeezed Meredith’s shoulder. One more touch like that and she’d break the woman’s hand.
The detective turned to Art. “Looks like you got pretty banged up. You say it wasn’t Ms. Strand—and we’re not saying we don’t believe you—but did you actually see who did it?”
Art hesitated before shaking his head. “I was watching TV when someone knocked on the door. I got up to check it, but it was dark, and when I went to open the door, someone hit me in the back of the head. I fell forward trying to turn around, but whoever it was kept hitting me. I got as far as the stairs before I blacked out.”
The detective scribbled in his notebook while Meredith’s imagination played out the rest—this evil entity stalking up the stairs, pausing in front of her daughter’s room, where she’d been sleeping, except she was awake now and screaming and screaming…
Tears streamed down her face while Art’s shoulders shook with silent sobs.
“I tried to… I’m sorry, Meredith. It’s all my fault. I’m too old, dammit. I couldn’t even get to the damn stairs. I couldn’t fight back. I couldn’t do anything. I’m useless.”
“So it sounds like we’re looking for two people,” the detective said, more to the cops than to Meredith and Art.
It took a second for Meredith to catch up. Two? Right. One person to knock on the door, one to beat the shit out of Art.
Art met her gaze, his left eye swollen shut. They’d really done a number on him. A gash along his cheek was crusted with black blood, and she could tell it burned as tears dripped into it. Bruises dotted his throat and chin. She took his hand, smearing blood on her own knuckles. If it hadn’t been him, it would’ve been her.
His chin dropped to his chest. Tears dripped onto the table.
The EMTs, who’d been stopped at the door by Nosehair, were finally let through to tend to Art. They dabbed at his cuts and patched and wiped while the detective watched with the kind of narrow-eyed focus of a person not wanting to miss a giveaway.
“I’m going to look for her,” Meredith said.
“Ma’am—” The lady cop again.
“Enough of the ma’am shit, okay? I can’t just sit here—”
The detective cut in. “Miss Strand, I promise you we are doing everything we can to find Alice. But we need you here in case the kidnapper”—Meredith sucked in a breath at the word, like she’d been punched—“tries to get in contact with you.”
“What, like for a ransom?” She laughed, but it felt like a scream. “I have nothing, okay? Less than nothing.”
“They don’t know that.”
A thought hit her like a wall. “My phone. I don’t have it.”
The detective raised an eyebrow.
“I lost it on the beach when I…” Her whole body boiled with shame. She’d been an idiot while her daughter had needed her.
“We’ll look for it.” The detective barked an order at Nosehair, who went outside, barking more orders into his shoulder walkie-talkie.
The beach. The dunes. The girl.
Her heart hammered. “Hold on. What about the red-haired girl?”
“What red-haired girl?”
“She was watching us from the beach. Me and the woman from the bar. This girl with long red hair. She was wearing a white dress.” The detective took notes as she spoke. “She was at my mother’s funeral a few days ago too. I chased her.”
“Where did she go?”
“I lost her at the end of our street.”
“Why did you chase her if you didn’t know her?”
“She said something to Alice.”
He perked up at that. “Last night? You didn’t mention—”
“No. Before. Days. I think. I don’t even know if…” She didn’t even know if she was the same girl. But she had to be. It was too much of a coincidence otherwise. “She told my daughter she was going to die.” Then, panic seeping into her voice. “It has to be her, right? I mean, who says that kind of thing to a kid unless…”
The detective’s expression was unreadable. “We’ll look into it.”
She told him about Vik too. The lighthouse. She didn’t totally believe him capable of inflicting the kinds of injuries Art had, let alone kidnapping Alice, but it was there in her head and it was something. Maybe someone had heard about it. Maybe they wanted the lighthouse too.
Then the detective stood. Meredith’s heart sank. “That’s it?” she asked.
“We’ll do everything we can. I promise.”
***
For an hour after the detectives left, Meredith and Art sat at her kitchen table in silence. Meredith didn’t trust herself to speak because it would destroy the fragile calm. She couldn’t stand or leave the room either, because the first place her legs would take her would be Alice’s bedroom. Seeing it again would only reinforce the idea that all of this—the attack, the girl on the beach, Alice—was real. It was happening now, in real life, and not just in her nightmares.
Art finally stood, his knees creaking and taking her untouched coffee with him. She heard the refrigerator open. Close. He set the half-empty bottle of vodka and two glasses in front of them. She knew that if she drank any more she’d only get sick, but her hands mechanically reached for the glass anyway, tipping the icy liquid into her mouth, which she swallowed without tasting.
Art poured two fingers for himself but didn’t touch it.
“It’s the curse.” The words slipped out, wet and fatty.
He didn’t give any indication that he’d heard.
It was a kindness, but she ignored it. The words hung there, suspended between them. All she could do was keep talking to fill the rest of the space. The unbearable silence. “Everyone around here talks about the cape like it exists for the sole purpose of either killing or blessing them. Curses or mermaids. They forget…” She sipped the vodka, willing it to stay down. “It’s all about the mothers.”
“Mothers?” He croaked the question.
“Don’t tell me you never noticed. You know the stories as well as I do. Better, probably, being on the outside. Mothers who disappear under the water or lose their minds. Mothers who leave their children. A whole fucking line of us, just waiting here to get picked off, one way or the other.” She pointed her finger at the window like a gun. “We’re a carnival game for this place. And do you know why?”
He stared at her, jaw working.
“Because being a shitty mother is hereditary.”
She’d spent so long cataloging her own mother’s failings, she’d ignored her own. If Alice was brilliant, it wasn’t because of anything Meredith had done. Ditto Alice’s empathy. Her willingness to be helpful. Screw everyone else—that was Meredith’s philosophy. She could have killed her child before she was even born. And here Kristin was, willing to set it all in Meredith’s lap. Couldn’t even keep her kid safe in her own house. A strangled laugh caught in her throat. Maybe that was the point. If there was one thing that would push her into the sea to die, it was knowing something terrible had happened to Alice, knowing it was her fault.
“Meredith…”
She waved him off, her movements heavy and languid. “Forget it.”
He was going to tell her she was crazy. She was drunk. She was grieving. He was right. There were any number of reasons to suspect some sick person—a normal human person—of taking Alice. To discount the sound of the ocean in her head. But it’d started the moment she set foot on the cape, and it was getting worse. Being drunk and grieving allowed her to admit it. Sickest of all, part of her was glad. If it was the curse that took Alice, then nothing Meredith could have done would have saved her.
You brought her to the cape.
And if she hadn’t, how long before Alice made her way here herself? Her mother was right. It was predestined. They could ignore it, push it to the backs of their minds the way Meredith had, but the pull, the desperate desire, would always be there. The cape was where it all ended. Where it would always end.
Art hesitated, probing the bandages on his face. The silence was almost as heavy as the hopelessness that settled in Meredith’s chest. “My father died when I was young. I accused your mother of killing him.”
Meredith looked up, figuring she knew the answer before asking. “Did she?”
“When people talked, I didn’t correct them or tell them that past was past. I put the blame on the first person I saw and held on with both hands. I didn’t care who it was or whether it made sense. I let it fester. And then, when I finally let it go, I’d passed the festering thing to Judith. She couldn’t forgive me for how I’d treated her. For what I’d done to her.”
“What did you do to her?”
He shook his head. His voice softened, like he was talking to himself. “It doesn’t matter because now she can never forgive me, and I can never forgive her and this”—he gestured openly—“is my penance.” He finally looked at her. “I’m trying to say there is no curse, but there is bad blood. Enough to drown in. It’s not your fault for getting caught up in it.”
She looked away, focusing on the condensation dripping off her glass. She wanted to believe him. “They’ll find her.”
She caught a sad smile out of the corner of her eye. “Of course they will,” he said.
***
Meredith finally changed out of her wet clothes just as the sun was coming up. Art was gone. He’d left shortly after telling her about his father, digging for forgiveness she wasn’t ready to give. The detective came by shortly after—no news—but he had her phone. She opened the lock screen, surprised the thing still had power, to find her call log open.
There were several missed calls from Kristin, which the detective had obviously seen.
“She’s in Arlington,” Meredith said, in case he had any ideas about accusing her.
The detective offered a grim half smile. “We had to check, obviously.”
“And Vik? The girl?”
“Mr. Nielsen claimed he was with his stepson, which the boy corroborated. We haven’t found the girl, but we’re still looking.”
She nodded, scrolling through the call log. There was another voicemail from Kristin. She deleted that one too.
“If there’s nothing else you can tell us…anywhere she might have gone…”
“There’s nothing. We haven’t been here long enough for her to have any secret places.”
But she loves the water. She ached imagining her daughter, walking along the water, only to be pulled in. She shook her head to try to clear the image.
“Okay, then.” The detective shuffled his feet. “We’ll keep you updated the second we know anything.”
She might have said thank you. She might have shut the door in his face. She hoped it was the latter.
After the detective had gone, Meredith started her own search, beginning with the beach.
What had looked alluring at night now looked taunting in the harsh light of day. The water washed cool and calm over the sand, stealing evidence of late-night walks and moonlit trysts. She jogged along the shoreline, watching for the slightest hint of a small footprint, a shoe, a hair, before the ocean could snatch it back. She called Alice’s name until her throat burned and her mouth was too dry to form words. Gulls flew overhead and it sounded like they were laughing. A buoy bobbed in the distance, but for an instant it was a person—her mother?—and Meredith imagined her mother emerging from the water in the middle of the night to steal Alice away until the thought was seared into her head and no matter what she did she couldn’t get rid of it. She saw her mother—her hair, drenched and tangled like seaweed down her back, and her skin, blue and bloated—holding Alice’s perfect hand as she lured her to the water’s edge.
“No!” The water swallowed her voice.
A couple walking their dog averted their eyes.
Meredith collapsed in a heap on the sand, trying to catch her breath. Her mother was gone. Her daughter was missing, and her wife had abandoned them. She was completely, utterly alone.
***
She didn’t want to go back to the house, and going into town would invite questions she couldn’t answer, so she sought familiar refuge in the light room. She climbed the stairs slowly, listening for a familiar giggle. You found me, Mom! Now you hide! The light room was, of course, empty, but the disappointment settled like a boulder in her stomach. “This is the part where I find you,” she said aloud. “This is the part where I yell at you for scaring me and then take you out for ice cream and never ever take my eyes off you again.”
Every minute that she didn’t find Alice, she lost her all over again.
She sat on the floor in the shadow between the mechanism and the wall, with her phone angled against the wall so she could see and hear it when the detective called. She noticed the cabinet doors were open and remembered the journals and jars of water she’d found before. She remembered drinking from them and the uneasy feeling it gave her. She remembered the fog that had shrouded her mind, and it made her think of being on the beach with the woman from the bar, how out of control she’d felt. As much as she wanted to dismiss it as an effect of the booze, she knew how it felt to be drunk. This wasn’t the same. This had been a compulsion, impossible to ignore. Even now she felt the whisper of something at the base of her neck, a tingling sensation she shook off as she peered into the cabinet and pulled one of the journals off the shelf.
After checking that her phone volume was turned up as high as it would go, she sat with one of the journals in her lap, flipping through the pages gently as most of them had come unglued from the spine and were brown and fragile with age. She paused halfway through at a rough sketch of a girl with waiflike features and dark circles under her eyes. The girl’s expression was serene, her mouth partially open, and her slender frame enveloped in shadow. The caption below read, in careful script:
Marina
Beside it, a short entry:
Father burned the photograph. I’ve recreated it here, though I am no artist. If Mother returns, she’ll be furious.
Then, scribbled in almost as an afterthought:
When Mother returns.
Meredith ran her fingers over the drawing, as though by touch she could summon her to life. She already knew how this story ended, but she couldn’t stop looking at Marina. As if this girl who was not Alice, but looked so much like her, could be the key to finding her.
Wind rushed past the light room, whipping through the cracks and up the stairwell. The ancient radio antenna on the roof leaned under the force of it with a deep groan. Each time the red light passed overhead, it bathed the room in a bloody glow.
She turned the page and read further.
I saw her again tonight. Hair black as night and eyes that glittered in the faintest light of the moon. She saw me too. I could feel the weight of her gaze. Her pull. What does she want from me?
Another page, a single line, dashed off so fast it was nearly illegible:
Why us? Why me? What does she want? Am I losing my mind?
Another:
…and it’s strange that I only see her when Beth is near. Is it me she wants? Or my daughter?
A chill ran down Meredith’s spine as she shut the journal, too frightened to read any more. Dangerous thoughts poked at her, reminding her of things she’d let slip away and others she’d shoved deep down into the dark. The face in the water. The ocean in her head. She focused instead on her phone. She pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around her legs, willing it to ring, but the only sound was the restless crash of the waves against the rocks below.