Meredith
Present Day
The small crowd that would be the search party gathered around Art’s porch a little before six. Most carried flashlights, and some wore reflective vests, so new the folds from their packaging were still visible along the front. Meredith recognized almost everyone—including the florist, lingering toward the back, with coffee in hand—but Vik and Bobby were conspicuously absent. A man, presumably a reporter, pointed a camera at a couple standing stoically at the edge of the group. Meredith stood next to Art, a picture taken the day before Alice went missing open on her phone. Part of her expected to see Kristin drive up in a shiny rental, all apologies and humiliation for her role in the complete collapse of their family. Meredith hadn’t caught much in the way of media coverage of her daughter’s disappearance—she shut off the TV anytime someone mentioned Alice’s name—but part of her hoped Kristin would see it so Meredith could place the blame firmly on her shoulders. If Kristin hadn’t ended their relationship, Meredith wouldn’t have come back here. They would’ve been safe. The thing about small towns, though, especially Cape Disappointment, was that it was selfish with its tragedies. The same people who would talk behind her back, who would leave fish heads at her mother’s funeral, would scoff at any national news networks trying to get the scoop on one of their own. Like an older sibling protecting a younger one, no one was allowed to beat on the people of the cape except the people of the cape.
“Try not to cluster,” Art said to the restless crowd. “We want to cover as much ground as possible before dark.”
At Meredith’s feet, a stack of papers printed with hers and Art’s phone numbers fluttered with the breeze, held in place by a rock.
“She’s probably scared. Hungry. Don’t go running toward her if you see her. Call us and keep her where you can see her.”
“What if she runs?” someone asked.
“Let her,” Art said.
The man didn’t seem satisfied with that answer; Meredith prayed he wouldn’t be the one to find Alice.
Even though it was Art doing the talking, she felt their eyes on her. Studying her. Judging her. What kind of parent allows their child to disappear? That kind, they’d say, pointing at her. Look at her. There’s something not right about her. What do you want to bet she did it? Of course she did. It’s always the mother.
When Art finished, the crowd dispersed, slowly at first, then all at once. The stoic couple ventured farther back into the neighborhood where streetlights were weak and teenagers liked to meet for fires. The reporter followed the group headed by the man who thought Alice would run, his voice carrying across the street: “Bet you next month’s salary I find her in one of those empty condos along the shore. That’s where I would go.”
With Art following, Meredith headed for the water.
Once she reached the sand, she slipped off her shoes, carrying them under one arm. She walked along the shoreline where water brushed over her feet, cold and tingly. Too scared to look across the water, too scared not to, a dark feeling settled in the pit of her stomach as she considered that she might see her daughter’s body carried to shore on a wave.
They passed the cove and continued toward the rockiest part of the shore accessible on foot. Art leaned on her shoulder as they negotiated the jagged cuts and curves before finally sliding down the other side onto dry sand mixed with the crushed remains of billions of shells.
“You should put your shoes back on,” Art said.
Meredith waved him off. Other than the girl, there was only one thing every story of the curse had in common: the water. Had Alice been pulled to it the way the others had? The way Meredith felt now, a tug just behind her ribs? If—when—they found Alice, this was where she’d be.
Midway down the beach, they came upon an ancient-looking boathouse. The windows were foggy with salt and age, but the door was unlocked.
Art nudged the door open, a strange smirk on his face. “I haven’t seen this place in years.”
“You know it?”
“Your mom and I used to keep stuff in here we didn’t want our parents to see. My first taxidermy projects. Her jars. Pretty sure it belonged to a great uncle or someone once.”
Meredith’s pulse skipped. “Jars?”
There was just enough sunlight to illuminate the room. Her heart sank. No Alice. Taking up most of the ground in the center was a small rowboat, the oars tucked inside. Along the walls were half a dozen shelves, all filled with mason jars like Meredith had seen in the light room. Water and silt and seaweed trembled inside them as Art tripped on a piece of fabric, falling into the wall.
“You okay?” she asked.
He nodded and then bent over to see what he’d tripped on. He held up a scrap of vivid pink cloth, ragged along the edge. A fish was embroidered into the corner. “Looks like a baby blanket. Yours maybe?”
“Maybe.” She didn’t recognize it.
She turned back to the jars and pulled one off the shelf. The lid was too tight, so she tried another. This one opened fairly easily, releasing a sickly sweet odor, like rotting fruit. She opened two more, and both emitted the same scent. It was animal—sweat and pheromones. Like her skin after a long day or a hard run.
“Do you smell that?” she asked, holding the jar beneath his nose.
He shook his head.
“Strange.”
She replaced the jar but was reluctant to leave. If these were her mother’s, what was she doing with them? Had she read Grace’s journal too?
“Come on,” Art said. “We’re running out of daylight.”
They returned to the shoreline, where Meredith walked with her eyes half-closed, taking deep breaths, trying to pick out that particular scent. For a moment, she thought she had it and she followed it into the water, stopping when the waves reached her knees. She felt Art’s hard gaze on her back, and she hoped he wouldn’t ask because she wouldn’t have an answer. She was acting on instinct, going where her gut told her to go. If this was the curse—and she was less and less convinced it could be anything else—she would need to stay with the water. If she was out there, if she had taken Alice, maybe somehow Meredith could convince her to give Alice back.
Meredith took another step forward and nearly tripped. Something sharp jabbed into the arch of her foot. At first she thought stingray, but as she probed the object with her toe, she realized it wasn’t alive. She plunged her hand beneath the water, feeling around until she finally pulled it up.
A shell.
No.
Alice’s shell.
“Alice?” Meredith fell to her knees and frantically crawled along the ground, running her fingers over every surface. “Alice!”
“What is it?” Art kicked up water as he ran toward her. “Is it Alice?”
Meredith held up the shell. “I found this. It’s hers. She’s here somewhere.”
His face fell. “It’s a shell, Meredith. It could be any—”
“No!” She continued to crawl, waves crashing against her body, over her head, up her nose, and in her mouth. “It’s hers. She wouldn’t let it go for anything, unless—” She bit off the last of the thought.
She crawled farther out, struggling against the current to stay close to the floor as it knocked her back. Her fingers slipped through a cluster of seaweed, and her heart thudded until she realized it wasn’t Alice’s hair.
Come on, Alice, she urged. I’m here. Come find me.
She only managed to crawl another foot before Art grabbed her under the arms like an infant and pulled her out of the water. Meredith writhed, struggling to break his grip. Grunting, he wrapped his arms around her waist and dragged her back to shore while she thrashed.
They collapsed together on the sand, his grip solid even as his breath came in ragged spurts. “Meredith. Stop. She’s. Not…not here.”
Hot tears fell down her face. “You don’t know that! I found the shell. She left it here for me. I know it.”
“Hush. Breathe.”
“No!” Sobs wracked her body. “You have to let me go after her! She needs me!”
“Yes. She does. But not like this, okay? Please. We will find her. I swear to you we will. But you can’t disappear like the rest of them.”
She fell quiet, and when she looked up at him, he couldn’t quite meet her eyes. “The rest of who?”
He shook his head, his voice barely above a whisper. “Come on. We still have a lot of beach to cover.”
“Who, Art?” She knew exactly who. She only wanted him to say their names. To confirm what she already knew.
He helped her to stand, eyes lingering on the shell still held tight in her hand. “This place does things to people. I don’t know why or what it is, but it makes people fall apart. You were smart. You left. Now you’re back and I see it digging its claws into you, and I can’t let you do to yourself what your mother did, not when you’ve got Alice.”
“I would never do that to her.”
“Judith might have said the same thing if someone bothered to ask.” Before she could respond, he added, “Judith wasn’t a bad person. She was troubled.”
“Troubled.” A rueful laugh burst from her mouth. “That’s what all of you say when we tell you something you don’t want to believe. They were all troubled. I’m troubled. Alice is troubled.”
A chill seeped into her bones, and she started to shiver. Art slipped off his windbreaker and wrapped it around her. He was a good man, and he cared about Alice, about all of them, but Meredith was glad she hadn’t told him about the boxes she’d found at Vik’s house. He’d only dismiss her and focus on the theft. Not what she’d found or what it meant.
She supposed it was easy for him to look the other way despite everything he knew. Maybe it was because she was a woman that Meredith was used to looking over her shoulder, expecting some faceless monster to creep out of the dark and devour her. Back in Arlington she was careful about parking under a streetlamp at night and never accepted a drink from the hand of a stranger. She carried pepper spray and kept a stun gun in her nightstand. Precautions against a known, expected threat. It was easy to miss in the moment, but in hindsight she realized that ever since she came back, her awareness, her expectation of the worst, had been dialed to eleven. All the precautions in the world did nothing against the curse. Her mother had proven that.
Thick clouds moved in, casting a gray pallor over everything. The sun gone, cold seeped deeper into her bones. A patch of seaweed brushed against her ankle with a small, silvery fish caught in the mass, bloated, with one bulging eye.
She looked away, unable to stop the image of Alice’s body taking its place.
To push the thought away, she focused on the red-haired girl. When she told Alice that they were all going to die, had it been a threat? Or was it the mechanism that put the machinations of the curse in motion? She’d spent all morning after being at Vik’s digging through the journals in the light room, her mother’s things, even a few of her own diaries from when she was a kid, miraculously shoved at the back of her childhood closet. There had to be a link between all of them—her mother, her grandmother, and so on, and not just their familial tie. There was a beginning somewhere. Whoever, whatever the red-haired girl was, she’d known who Alice was. Even if Alice had broken their stranger-danger rule and told, her last name was hyphenated—Alice Strand-Olivier—a name not obviously tied to the curse or the stories. Which meant the red-haired girl had sought her out. Had maybe been watching them since they’d arrived at the cape.
Art put an arm around her, startling her.
“Sorry,” he said. “You looked like you needed it.”
“I’m okay,” she said. “I think I just need…” And just as if her thoughts had summoned her, she glanced up over his shoulder and saw the red-haired girl standing on top of the rocks, hair whipping in the wind.
Art pulled back and frowned. “What?”
Meredith took a shaky step forward. “It’s her. She’s—”
The girl jumped down the other side of the rocks, out of sight.
Still gripping the shell, Meredith broke away from Art and ran after the girl. She would not lose her this time.
“Meredith!” The wind snatched his voice as she put more and more distance between them.
There was no way he could keep up with her. No way he could stop her.
She scaled the rocks, ignoring the pain in her bare feet and clambered over the edge, rolling onto the sand. The girl was there, in the distance, but close enough that Meredith could still catch her. There was no use yelling; Meredith needed her breath, so she sprinted across the sand. Her calves burned with the effort, and she gritted her teeth as her muscles threatened to lock. The girl turned away from the sand and started for the waves, her feet kicking up water. Meredith allowed herself a brief moment to catch her breath. The girl wouldn’t be able to swim far.
But when she hit the water, it was like it parted for her. She easily cut through the waves, and soon she was out beyond the buoys, slicing across the water faster than Meredith thought was possible.
Meredith’s body trembled with the cold and the ache. She was a strong swimmer, but she was no match for the red-haired girl. She refused to give up, though. She doubled back to the boathouse. Her heart hammering in her chest, Meredith ducked inside and dragged the old rowboat through the door and out onto the sand, toward the water. That she’d never been in a boat, never rowed, hadn’t been farther than knee-deep in the surf since her sixteenth birthday didn’t cross her mind.
The girl had put some distance between them already, but Meredith wasn’t about to let her out of her sight. She pushed the boat out onto the water as far as she could before she was too deep to hold the boat in place. She scrambled over the side and gripped the edges as it rocked beneath her. Shooting a glance over her shoulder—the girl had stopped, but only long enough to make eye contact before she dove again—Meredith slid the oars into their oarlocks and started to row.
Somehow, the ancient thing held as wave after wave slammed into her, threatening to pull her back to shore. Her muscles burned with each rotation, and she locked her feet against the second bench to gain some leverage. The girl could only swim so far before she’d have to give up, and when she did, Meredith would be there. She would get her in the boat, and she would refuse to bring her back to shore until she told Meredith where to find Alice. She’d demand the girl take her to her daughter, and the girl would have no choice.
Meredith focused on her plan, ignoring how far out into the restless sea she was going. She swallowed the rock of fear lodged in her throat, gaze darting across the water, ready to jump at the first sight of the girl’s bright red hair.
Soon, she thought. I’ll have my daughter soon.