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“Where have you been?” her dad said.
“I was on the beach,” she said. “I had to go back for my phone.”
That wasn’t a lie. She had been on the beach and she did go back for her phone. That was why she had missed his texts. The messages started out innocent—You hungry?—and finished a bit more like Why aren’t you answering?
There were also ten unanswered calls.
“Where we going?” She noticed the tool bag. It was the small one.
“You’re not coming with me, not until I figure out a few things.”
He touched his face and brushed his temple. Now they were both hiding something. His footsteps were slow and heavy. He hefted the tool bag over his shoulder with a sigh. If the bags under his eyes got any bigger, he could just pack his equipment on his face.
“We can go home, you know,” she said. “Give back the money and let her find someone else.”
A few minutes ago, he would have had to drag her off the island. There was too much left to discover. But the weights he’d shouldered since arriving were beginning to crush him.
He put his arm around her and kissed her forehead. “You getting bored?”
“No. It’s just, you haven’t slept and—”
“I just woke up. There are a few things to work out and then it will feel more like Christmas. All right?”
His smile was weak but valiant. The skin on his neck was loose. They’d only been there a few weeks and he already looked ghostly. His habit of avoiding food when he fell into hyperfocus was legendary. It was little sleep and no eating until things got worked out.
Or something broke.
“At least come back for dinner,” she said. “The miser will understand.”
He frowned. “Miser?”
“That’s her name.” She looked up, waiting for a sweet, angry voice to chime. A cloud of gnats looked back. They see you when you’re sleeping.
He kissed her on the forehead and told her not to worry. He’d be back for dinner. She almost believed him. If she was reading his thoughts correctly—and she had a master’s degree in reading her dad’s moods—he was worried about her.
And something much bigger.
***
HE WENT BACK TO THE tower.
That was what her phone said. She was tempted to call him or text, to ask what he was doing in the tower. The answer would be no, but at least she would know he was there.
And not here.
She changed the settings on her phone so it wouldn’t go to sleep and propped it on a pillow. As long as his location stayed in the tower, it was open season with the sat laptop.
The history hadn’t changed.
He hadn’t searched a website since she’d last been on. Unless, of course, he was erasing his tracks too, but there would be no reason to do that unless he suspected her of being on it. She would’ve heard about that.
She opened the blog post about Jerri Mitchell and Avocado, Inc.’s success in biotech advancements.
It was easy to find more history on Jerri’s rise to biotech fame. She had joined the company at the beginning of its inception, when co-owners Jacob Marley and Ebenezer Scrooge started it. They were quickly hailed as innovative and ground-breaking in the field of artificial intelligence and robotic enhancement. After Jacob died and Eb’s disappearance, she had taken over the leadership and steered the company in a new direction.
The company became the leader in biotechnology.
Their impact was global. Avocado cured diseases, saved lives and reduced suffering in the world. Jerri was loved by her employees and investors. She was the face of Avocado, but her personal life was the world’s best kept secret. No one knew what she did at home.
Unlike her sister.
Heather was Avocado’s lead scientist with several breakthrough discoveries on synthetic stem cells. A list of accomplishments accompanied her résumé—awards, recognitions, standards of excellence, and humanitarian aid.
But she rarely stayed home.
She was an adventurer, a self-admitted adrenaline junkie. A risk-taker to the extreme. Athletic, she ran track and field in college while earning a PhD in physics and biomedical research. There were blogs that featured her standing on Mount Everest, ice climbing frozen waterfalls, free climbing the Thimble in South Dakota, and spelunking an underground river in Puerto Princesa.
She also did water missions in India and aided Doctors without Borders in Syria. She was accompanied by her son on most of the trips. There was a photo of them smiling on a beach.
Then something happened.
The woman who never turned down an interview was never seen in public again. No more globetrotting or mission trips to aid the needy. She closed the gates on her ranch. Avocado offered no explanation for her behavior, simply asked that the media respect her privacy.
Rumors were that she moved her staff out of her lab, but no one would confirm it. Alone, she was said to work for days at a time. No one had access to her research. Not even her sister.
Arguments ensued. The stock value dropped.
In a company that worked harmoniously for decades, discord finally appeared, and no one knew why. A shake-up was coming. Heather was still employed but no longer the lead scientist. It wouldn’t be long before her sister would cut her loose.
But she didn’t have to.
The explosion happened on Christmas Eve. It was an oddity that defied explanation by experts. It was more of an implosion. Employees described the experience as a subterranean detonation. They thought it was a Southern California earthquake. But pictures didn’t rattle off desks and walls didn’t crack. It was over as soon as it started.
And it left a deep, deep hole.
A guard described a bright light inside the windows of Heather’s lab. The walls began to glow and then melted. Steel, concrete, stone and everything inside the building turned to liquid and trickled into the ground. All traces of Heather and her research vanished into a soupy magma that crystalized into a hole with glass walls. The event was still memorialized today.
A pond called Glassy Bottom.
The mystery of Heather’s death and what she was doing was unknown to even her sister. Jerri Mitchell rarely spoke about it until the day she died. There was only one instance when she mentioned Heather by name. Heather, who never married, who had a fatherless son by means of artificial insemination, didn’t share Jerri’s last name.
Heather Miser.
Kandi noticed a final paragraph that mentioned her son. He was missing, too.
There was no mention if he had accompanied her to the lab that day, although guards testified she had come to the lab alone. It was dark when the accident happened. What alarmed Kandi wasn’t so much their disappearance as the picture of her son. She grabbed her phone and took a picture of the screen.
The accident happened twenty years ago.
***
SHE WAS LIGHT-HEADED.
Adrenaline fumes teased her tired muscles. When she approached the end of B wing, the heaviness of reality condensed around her and fear reintroduced itself to her stomach. She eased to a stop outside the festive doors. For the first time, Sandy wasn’t there to stop her.
And there was no music.
She stepped off the glider with newborn legs. The silence was a menacing ghost. She got back on the glider and begged her dad to leave. It only took one more look at her phone, the photo of Heather Miser’s son, and she rapped the secret knock.
The doors swung open.
More silence oozed out of the room. The tree was freshly decorated with looping strands of popcorn. The presents were tightly wrapped and piled high. The smell of cookies was nowhere to be found. When Sonny didn’t come out to greet her, she tapped on the glass and called his name.
She hit it harder.
Her voice echoed down the hall. Something was wrong. She’d felt it the moment she’d snapped the picture on the laptop. It was a photo of Sonny from twenty years ago. He looked exactly like he did today. And now he was gone.
So was her carving.
He had done it for her as a gift and placed it on an altar. Her face, expertly carved from a block of wood, had been looking at her the last time she visited. Everything was still in the room except for the carving.
“He’s gone.”
Sandy startled her. She slid to the floor with her back to the glass. Her heart hammered her head; her breath roared in her ears. The sandman was there.
His sense of humor was not.
Kandi held up the phone. Sandy slowly nodded. When she caught her breath, she said slowly and definitively, “Tell me about the others.”