“WAIT A SECOND,” said Josie, stopping short beneath the dripping branches. Water splashed against her scalp, but she smoothed it away. “Dory Sauvage is alive?” Everyone else paused along with her, willing, for a moment, to catch their breath.

“Her married name is Dorothea Petit,” Margo answered. “And she’s gone by Thea for years and years. But yes. My mother is no ghost.”

“Maybe the figure we saw in the house wasn’t your mother,” Eli said. “Maybe it was some other girl.”

“But Dory’s journal didn’t mention another girl,” said Josie. “I mean, other than the girlfriends, Esther and Betty. But they were older. It had to have been her.”

Beatrice spoke up. “Not necessarily.”

“How’s that?” Vivian asked.

Beatrice shrugged. “All I’m suggesting is that, in this life, there are more things that remain mysterious to us than not.”

“When it was happening,” Josie added, “when we saw her, I kept feeling like the island, or something, was trying to communicate with us. Share its memories. It felt like I was watching a movie.”

“How much longer ’til we reach the boathouse?” Aimee interrupted, as though she were pretending that the last ten seconds of talk hadn’t happened.

“That depends on how important everyone else feels it is to answer all of our questions right now,” Beatrice said. “I say we keep walking. If we circle the edge of the yard, we’ll be there in no time.”

Once they’d stepped out onto the lawn, there was nothing but the darkness to cover them from the house. To their right, a thicket of trees clung to the rocks that leaned out over the ocean. A sporadic breeze continued to spray what was left of the rain. They walked in silence, ducking their heads, trying to be as small as possible.

Eli kept part of his vision on Beatrice, who was right ahead of him; he focused the other part at the top of the hill. The dark house looked as ominous as the fort. He knew now that bad things could happen in places as glorious as a white marble mansion or as decrepit as an abandoned jail cell. His bones were like liquid, conducting the buzzing electricity that flowed from his brain. An ambush might come at any moment, from any direction. He felt ready to pop. Josie strolled up beside him, and his nerves dialed down a notch.

He couldn’t stop thinking about the girl who’d appeared in Josie’s room that day. The vision. If evil can sleep in a certain place, waiting for the right moment to strike, then maybe it stood to reason that the place would have a desire to vanquish that evil. And if Margo’s presence on Stone’s Throw triggered the old dormant malevolence to awaken, to seek revenge, maybe it also triggered something good as well.

The wharf and the boathouse appeared ahead, the silhouette of its two-story roof sloping sharply toward the water that crashed up from below, splashing little explosions of foam high into the air.