It was cool in the cabin. Dark as a cave. The only light that permeated the vast windows was the faint, pearlescent haze of the moon. In the living room, the fireplace glowed with the low, barely breathing embers of a fire. It was past midnight. The house was asleep, but for her own footsteps creeping toward the front door, and the silhouette of someone sitting on the couch.
Morgan jumped, clutching her chest. The strap of her duffel chafed her neck as it shifted.
The glow of an iPad illuminated Eleanor’s face, made her look like a ghost. She wore a long pale nightgown, and Morgan was reminded of the wolf disguised as Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother.
“Sleepwalking again?” she asked. “At least you’ll be prepared this time.” She raised a brow, noting the fact that Morgan was dressed in her winter coat, hat, and scarf.
Morgan bit her lip. She pressed her palms against the wall, felt the cold soak into her skin. “I was—” She stopped. She didn’t have an answer other than the truth.
“It’s okay, Morgan, I won’t stop you.” Eleanor’s voice was composed, gentle. “It’s just … I never thanked you for the scanning project you did for me. The USBs look wonderful.”
Morgan clenched her jaw. Nodded.
“It must have been hard for you. Having to touch all those photographs.”
Morgan’s brows knit. There was the softest click as she powered off her device and set it on the end table. The fire rimmed her profile, the rest of her face a mystery. “Seeing Clive with us,” she added. “With his wife and his other children.”
The word “other” hung like an icicle between them. Every nerve in Morgan’s body went numb. “You know who I am?”
“My husband’s daughter? Yes, I know.”
Morgan lowered her duffel bag to the floor. Her shoulders burned. “How?” she asked, and when she looked up, she discovered that Eleanor had begun to approach her. In a moment, they were but an arm’s length apart. With Eleanor’s back to the only light source, Morgan knew that the woman could see her face, but for Morgan, Eleanor was only a shadow.
“It’s in the eyes,” said Eleanor. “Only Clive had eyes that light shade of green. Like sea glass. In fact, I loved the color so much I convinced him to let me have the whole house painted that color.”
Morgan recalled the first time she’d driven up to the Reynolds’s sea glass–colored mansion and couldn’t help but feel a little foolish. How often, over the past three decades, had she looked into the mirror, wondering who made her, when, according to Eleanor, Clive Reynolds was written all over her face.
“There are certain mannerisms, too,” said Eleanor. “The night of the Christmas party, I watched you straighten the picture frames on the mantel, and I wondered. He used to tidy up those photos like it was his job, making sure each corner of each frame was perfectly in line with the next.”
Silence fell like a blanket of snow. The fire hissed.
“The film roll wasn’t corroded,” said Eleanor. “It showed Clive and you … and your mother, didn’t it?”
Nearly paralyzed with apprehension, Morgan nodded.
Eleanor sighed. “You know, Christopher gave me that film roll over two decades ago and I told him to stick it where the sun doesn’t shine. I guess I thought … I hoped … that if I didn’t see it, it wouldn’t be true. That I could keep on pretending Clive was the devoted husband and the doting father to his four children that everyone believed him to be. And I did pretend, for quite a while after that, actually. I almost believed it myself.”
“When did you stop?” Morgan chanced. Her voice came out as a whisper.
“The day he disappeared. Honestly, I knew. I knew, then, when the police arrived at the house to take my statement, that he wasn’t ever coming home. That his past had caught up with him and not even that damn Widowmaker could have outrun it.”
“I’m sorry,” said Morgan.
“Don’t be sorry over something you’ve got no control of, darling. You might as well be sorry for the rain.”
“What can I do?”
“You can answer one thing.”
Anything, Morgan was about to say. It was the least she could do. After all, she had ruined this family: Eleanor, David, Cora, Carlisle, and Bennett. Jesus, Bennett. She would have to vanish from his life as swiftly and surely as their father had. But, her mouth remained shut. She couldn’t even form one single word.
“What happened to him?” Eleanor asked, and her voice sounded like ice breaking.
Morgan withered and felt akin to the dying embers in the fireplace. “I don’t know.”
Eleanor sighed as what was perhaps her last hope was extinguished. “That’s what I expected. I just … I thought that if anyone had seen Clive one last time, it might have been you.”
An invisible screw turned in Morgan’s gut. She wished she could remember the last time she’d seen Clive, but her brain had blocked out every shard of memory he was in. All she knew was the house on Winslow Street and the horrors that happened in the dark—the horrors that still haunted her every time she closed her eyes. She didn’t realize a tear had slid down her cheek until she felt Eleanor’s cool fingertip there to catch it.
“I’m sorry.” She whispered it like a secret shared between just the two of them. It was her last goodbye to Eleanor Reynolds, the fabled black widow of Black Harbor, before she slipped out the front door into the cold, starlit night.
Morgan shot a wary, wild-eyed glance over her shoulder as she turned the key in the snowmobile’s ignition. It was a sharp sound, at first, that softened into a purr as the engine warmed up.
Around her, all was still. Even the wind ceased to swim through the trees. But for all she knew, Christopher could be throwing his boots on right now, ready to chase her down. She was doing exactly what he’d hoped for all this time, she realized. He’d burned down The Ruins and left her the key, lured her home. And she was about to find out what the hell for.
The tracks from yesterday were still visible. She followed them, wending through birch trees and evergreens, her ears on high alert for the sound of another engine.
But it was just her. Alone in this treacherous winterscape.
She glided past the snow-covered ghost town. Past the library, the bait shop, and the post office. The shed, the woodpile, the half-sunk canoe. It was close. When she’d come here earlier it seemed only seconds had passed between the canoe and the call box.
And then … yes.
A swath of moonlight, dappled through the trees, shone down on it. She slowed the snowmobile, left the engine running as she hopped off and sank into knee-deep drifts. She was so filled with excitement that she didn’t even feel the cold as she waded through the snow. She tore off her glove and slid the key out of her cuff, closing her fist tightly around it. Now less than two feet from the call box, and her eyes having adjusted to the dark, she read the embossed print on the metal: GAMEWELL CO., LOOMIS POLICE DEPT. A keyhole stared at her. Dared her to try the black skeleton key.
Morgan plunged it into the aperture and turned. The tumblers were rusted, but as she turned harder, with a noise that sounded like a yawn, the door opened to reveal an old phone and a pad of curled paper. Her stomach lurched. The notepad was blank. She could hurl into a snowbank right now. She’d come all this way, gone through all this trouble, for what? An antique?
With frozen fingers, Morgan flipped through the pages. Empty. Whatever, if anything, had been written, had been erased by time.
She picked up the phone, held it to her ear. Not even a dial tone.
Her rage thawed her from the inside out. She slammed the phone receiver down. It was so cold it shattered. And then, a little black panel fell forward.
Bricks of faded green lined the box. Twenty stacks of hundred-dollar bills. Morgan’s mouth fell open. There had to be at least $200,000 here, in this random box in the middle of fucking nowhere. She blinked, half expecting it to disappear, but it didn’t. She noticed a black Moleskine journal tucked in the corner. It reminded her of Hudson’s memo pad, the one he kept the Ruins ticket in as a bookmark.
She flipped it open to the first page and read:
Morgan. My darling. My rúin.
The hair on the back of her neck stood on end.
You remember what it means, don’t you? Rúin. It’s from an Irish song; we used to listen to those a lot, you and me. It means “secret,” like a secret treasure, something precious. It means you, my perfect girl. My secret daughter.
If only I could have kept you.
I’m sorry, Morgan. For everything. All that money I sent your mother, I thought she was using it for you—to buy you clothes and food and books. I didn’t know she’d left the country and abandoned you to the care of your aunt. And I use that word “care” ironically, Morgan, I do.
I’m a ruined man, Morgan. Not a rúin like you, but a devastated husk of a man. I have nothing. I am nothing. All I can leave you is the value of my last earthly possession: a 1978 Porsche 930 Turbo. Use it to see the world—and live. Live the life you deserve.
Love eternal,
Dad
Her teardrops froze on the letter. Had she misinterpreted his words all this time? She wasn’t a ruin or a wretch; she was her father’s rúin, his secret treasure. Bern had misconstrued the words, made them into something twisted and ugly.
“Morgan!” Her ears pricked at the sound of her name ricocheting off the trees. It was Bennett. She could barely hear him over the purring of the snowmobile. “Morgan!” He was getting closer.
Shoving the journal back in the box, she slammed the door and turned the key in the lock.
“Morgan! Please, stop!”
The key was stuck. She jiggled it but it wouldn’t budge. Fuck.
“Morgan!”
She turned. He was closer than she thought and closing in. He stopped in his tracks, like a hunter who’s just startled a fawn. His skin was pale in the moonlight, his hair matted to his forehead. He’d left the house in such a hurry he hadn’t even zipped his jacket. His pajama pants were tucked into his boots that were now filled with snow.
But he smiled. It was a slow smile, aged like a fine wine.
Horror set into Morgan like rigor mortis in a corpse. He’d been waiting to break out that smile, she realized. Ever since he’d tied the key to a red balloon and left it on a smoldering stairwell. She realized something else, too: she’d been played—hard—and she’d lost at her own fucking game.
No. It never was her game. It was Bennett’s. It had always been Bennett’s.
He paused in his advance. They were within spitting distance of each other now. “I see you’ve finally claimed your inheritance. Took you long enough.”
Inheritance. The words struck a chord. “You knew.”
“For a while now, yeah.” Bennett swiped away a piece of hair that had fallen into his eyes. “Remember when I told you we didn’t come here for a long time after he died? When we finally reopened the cabin two years ago, I found an envelope shoved in the back of the mailbox. The little red flag must’ve blown down or something.” He smiled again, remembering his good fortune. “The mailman never picked it up. So there it waited, this envelope that held nothing but an address and a key, for…” He blew out a breath that suspended in front of him for a second before dissipating. “Eighteen years?”
Morgan thought back to the envelope with the note written on the back. My Rúin. 604 Winslow Street. Black Harbor. So, he’d known where to look for her. Or, where to start, at least.
“But, how did you—”
“—know you existed?” He shrugged. “My father was a better businessman than a con man. He couldn’t cover his tracks to save his life. When I found the envelope, I started putting the pieces together. Knowing you’d once lived there, at that shack on Winslow Street, didn’t do me a whole lot of good, for a while, anyway. I did my research and found out you went into the foster care system. Changed your last name. You’re kind of a ghost, you know?”
Morgan swallowed. She liked it that way. No paper trail. And yet, he’d still managed to track her down.
“And then I found the video on Christopher’s desktop,” Bennett went on. “It’s amazing what turns up when you stop searching.” He laughed and rolled his eyes as though to say, Oh, that Uncle Christopher. “I had a sneaking suspicion he was up to some shit, so I hacked into his computer. The son of a bitch has been embezzling from the family business for years, paying for prostitutes and setting himself up for a nice oceanside house in Switzerland. Gave a shady Investigator Gauthreaux a fat payday, too, a while back. My guess to abandon the case and get the hell outta Dodge.”
Morgan’s mind raced. Hudson had mentioned there were investigators before him who had tried and failed to solve the Clive Reynolds case—there had to have been. Christopher had paid at least one of them off to drop the investigation and disappear. She remembered the photos of the drowned Porsche on Hudson’s coffee table. The body in the passenger seat with the busted eye socket, and she knew, with the same certainty that Christopher had been one of the monsters who paid Aunt Bern to do unspeakable things to her as a child, that he had put him there. Why else would he care about police digging into his brother’s life? Unless he had ended that, too.
“The video file was right there,” said Bennett, “even labeled Morgan Reynolds. I saw you incorporated the whole ‘ruin’ thing in your branding. It really has become your identity, hasn’t it?”
“Who set the fire?” Morgan asked. “You or Christopher?”
Bennett elevated his brows as if to ask whether or not she knew him at all. She didn’t, but she was getting to know him, now. “I made Christopher do it. Who knew all that spray paint on the walls would be so goddamn flammable. Then I made him sit, watch, wait until the fire department had put out the flames, so he could leave a little message for you.”
All roads lead back to home. “You were blackmailing him.” The answer was obvious now. Bennett had obtained the video from his uncle’s computer, and used it to become his puppet master. Then, he’d burned it onto a disc and put it in a portable DVD player for her to find.
Bennett’s mouth was open as though poised to speak—or strike—and then it twisted into a smile. “I’m a man of opportunity, Miss Mori. I told you that.”
“Just like you blackmailed him to kill that cop.” It was all falling into place now. He had a mark on his neck. Her mark. The one she’d seared into his flesh.
Slowly, Bennett clapped. “Did anyone ever tell you you’re not as stupid as you look? Convincing him was too easy. Uncle Christopher’s become gullible in his old age.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him that my mother had employed the services of Officer Garrison as a private investigator to solve my father’s cold case. Which was true. And cops are creatures of habit. It didn’t take a genius to figure out he parked at that old furniture store every night. Why do you think I bought the property? Couple weeks of watching him on surveillance, and I had his routine down to a T.”
Morgan didn’t realize she was biting down on the studs in her lip until she tasted blood. “What did you tell Christopher that wasn’t true?”
“That my father was alive. Trust me, Dad’s return from the grave would not have been good for old Uncle Christopher. He’d tried to sexually assault his daughter, for one thing—how’d you like the video, by the way? Little graphic for my taste, but it held my attention. And for another, he was stealing from the family business. Not to mention, I’m sure there were other things Christopher didn’t need coming up to the surface.”
“Did you kill him?” she asked, though she knew the answer. “Clive?”
“He was going to do it himself. I just gave him a little push.”
Morgan’s head was shaking, shivering like a pine cone on a branch. “Why?”
“Why’d I push him or why did he hang a tire chain around his neck and walk to the end of the dock? Because he knew he’d fucked us over, that’s why. And because he was a coward. He couldn’t face his own music—divorce, prison, all of the above.” Bennett shook his head. “He didn’t get to go out like that. On his own terms. Not after what he did to our family.”
He’d created a monster, that’s what he’d done, Morgan thought. He’d created me. “How did you know, though?” she asked, her teeth chattering. “That he had … m-me?” The cold was so intense, her fingertips were on fire. She’d been out here more than fifteen minutes already. Frostbite could be setting in.
“You’ve seen the red rotary phone in the kitchen?” Bennett’s eyes were a pair of frozen moons as they locked on to her. The tendons in his neck went taut as he fought against the cold. “I used to pick it up after he’d been upstairs for a while. See if I could hear voices on the other line. Nine times out of ten he was talking to her—Ava. She made a lot of threats. Said she’d go to the press. Show up and drop you off at our doorstep, which … I mean, I guess you eventually did yourself. With some guidance.”
Morgan stood still. She was a doe, locked in the hunter’s sights.
“They were at Carlisle’s basketball tournament that day,” Bennett explained. “Mom, Cora, Carlisle, obviously. David was in his room, doing emo shit, like always. Dad said he was gonna run errands. I told him I was going to my friend’s house, but I just laid down in the trunk of the car. It was too easy. I slept most of the way.” He smirked at how cool he’d played it then, as a twelve-year-old, hitching a ride to murder his own father.
“Did you know?” Morgan asked.
“Know what?”
“That you were going to kill him?”
“Actually, no. I was just curious. I wanted to know where he was off to. I didn’t think about it at all, in fact. It just … happened. You should’ve seen the look in his eyes. Just … fear. As pure as I’d ever seen it. And then a little confusion crept in, as he recognized my face, I suppose. He reached for me, but … I wasn’t really in a mood to help him out.”
“You let him drown.”
“Like I said, he was gonna do it anyway.”
Morgan’s breath hitched. He’d brought her out here to do the same thing. To do her in like he’d done their father twenty years ago. “Is that why you gave me the key?” she asked. “To lure me here?”
“Honestly, I just wanted to know what the hell it opened. I’ve spent the last two years opening every door, every drawer, every lockbox I could find. You were my last resort. I figured if anyone could figure it out, it would be you. And I was right. It’s funny how mnemonics work, isn’t it? You’d forgotten everything and suddenly, when a stranger gives you a key, you remember you had a whole other life.”
Morgan was dizzy. She felt the weight of the sky pressing down on her and yet her feet almost lifting off the ground. Everything she’d been searching for—the lock that fit the key, the answers to who she was, the mystery of Clive Reynolds—all led to here, a northern nowhere. If you scream in the woods but there’s no one around to hear you, did you make a noise at all?
“How’d you know I’d go back to the house on Winslow Street?”
Bennett shrugged. “Because I’d have done the same thing in your shoes. We’re made of the same stuff, Morgan, you and me.” She recognized the line from his limerick. “Just like David and Carlisle. Only, you and I are too dangerous to coexist.” The snow crunched beneath his boots as he took a step toward her. He curved his arm, as though to coax her into a hug. His other hand was in his pocket. “Thank you, Morgan,” he said softly.
“For what?”
The bullet was hot when it slammed into her chest. She catapulted backward. Her ribs shattered. She coughed and blood sprayed the snow. The shot woke the entire woods. Suddenly, she heard what sounded like thousands of birds screaming. They evacuated from their branches in what looked like a plume of black smoke, the collective movement of their wings causing snow to plummet all around her.
Snow cradled her skull. Morgan stared up at the stars above, the evergreen spires making the sky into a jagged cutout. She gasped. Her throat made a hissing sound. So, this was what dying felt like. She thought she’d experienced it before, with all those plastic bags over her head, but this was different.
She heard footsteps crunching on snow as Bennett approached her. Heard his excited breathing, his lips peeling back as he grinned. The metallic sound of a spring as his finger squeezed the trigger.
And then, like a wounded doe always does, she shot upright and ran toward the water.