The Friday after Memorial Day was marked by the end of forty-eight hours of record-breaking summer storms, mildly less tension on Aunt Olivia’s part as she packed for another weekend trip to the lake, and a cryptic text that Lily and I received at the exact same time.
@) - -‘ - , - - -
It took me several seconds to realize that if you held the phone sideways, the image resembled a rose. The text that arrived on the rose’s heel was more immediately recognizable.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~8<
A snake. Together, the two symbols left very little doubt about who the messages—and a third text that followed from the same blocked number—were from.
Falling Springs. 2:30 a.m. Tonight.
“What’s Falling Springs?” I asked Lily.
She shushed me. Once she’d glanced back over her shoulder to verify that Aunt Olivia was still absorbed in cross-referencing two of her lists, Lily pulled me into the foyer. “Falling Springs is a cove on the other side of the lake,” she said softly.
“Is it a scandalous cove?” I asked in an exaggerated whisper.
Lily realized halfway through nodding that I was joking. She pointed her manicured index finger at me in a manner that I assumed I was supposed to find forbidding.
“Okay, okay,” I replied. “No jokes.”
“It’s not the cove associated with Falling Springs that’s scandalous,” Lily whispered in a tone that told me I’d been begrudgingly forgiven. “It’s the cliffs.”
That night, wearing swimsuits and the barest of cover-ups, we snuck down to the dock at two in the morning, lowered the smaller of the family’s two boats into the water, and glided silently backward into the darkened cove. Picking up Campbell and Sadie-Grace on the way, we made for Falling Springs.
“So . . .” Campbell took up position next to me. “What’s the plan?”
She’d kept her voice low, but I still cast a glance at Lily, who was focusing on driving the boat, and Sadie-Grace, who was “helping Lily focus,” before I supplied a response. “The plan,” I murmured, “is to talk to Victoria again.”
I’d caught Campbell up on the conversation I’d had with Victoria Gutierrez at The Big Bang. Cam was as invested in finding Ana’s baby—her half-sibling—as I was. And that meant that she was just as interested in what Victoria had to say.
“I didn’t actually expect you to answer my question,” Campbell murmured beside me. “It was more of a courtesy question, really. You were supposed to ask what my plan was.”
Having seen one of Campbell’s schemes up close and personal, I was almost afraid to ask. “What’s your plan?”
“Talk to Victoria.” She smiled, her teeth a flash of white in the dark. “No offense, but I’m better at talking than you are.”
“Me too!” Sadie-Grace appeared between us. “I’m so good at talking that sometimes, once I start, I can’t even stop!”
Neither Campbell nor I had a reply for that. We sank into silence, my brain working overtime calculating the likelihood that Cam could get more out of Victoria than I had.
“There,” Lily said suddenly. She eased off the gas, allowing momentum to push the boat farther and farther into a long and narrow cove shaped—appropriately—like a snake.
Following Lily’s gaze, I understood why she hadn’t wanted her mother to even hear the words Falling Springs. I could make out five or six boats, each marked with a single light on the front, tied together in a line, front to front and back to back. As we approached, someone picked up a pole that one of the lights was fixed to, and used it to wave Lily to the far side of the line.
That wasn’t the wild part.
Velvety darkness had settled over the water, but the bobbing lights on the boats and a white and glowing half-moon overhead cast just enough light to illuminate the nearby shore. Cliffs stretched up overhead, five or six stories at least. The farther up I looked, the steeper the incline got, until at the top, the drop-off was sudden and complete.
In isolation, what I was seeing wouldn’t have struck me as ominous—or ill-advised. But as Lily had explained to me hours earlier, the term Falling Springs wasn’t just synonymous with this cove and these cliffs.
It was a shorthand for the activities the cove and the cliffs were most known for. Parties. Debauchery. Liquid courage.
And jumping.