The next morning, Zoey awoke to an empty house and a note pinned to the refrigerator with a magnet:
Zo—
Back for lunch at noon. Do dishes, please, and start a load of towels.
Love,
Dad
Zoey crumpled the note in her hand.
Sure, she’d wash the dishes.
Then she was going to snoop.
If Marion could scheme and seduce, then Zoey could get off her ass and find that damn book.
And, maybe, experiment with whatever new talent for throwing heavy objects she apparently possessed?
She shook her head. Focus, Zoey.
After she started the dishwasher, she brought the trash to the garbage can by the fence, opened the lid, and dropped the bag inside. She stood there, hands on hips, breathing just a little bit hard. She’d slept terribly and hadn’t managed to stomach breakfast. Every time she closed her eyes, she felt her palm slam against Val’s chest. She saw Val skidding into the flowers, and the horrified stares of John and Peter.
“Whatever.” Zoey shook out her body, her fingers and toes. “Whatever.”
It was fine. Everything was fine.
And it would be better once she had that book in her hands.
Her phone beeped. A text from Grayson:
You all right, Zo?
Zoey replied:
Fine.
Another text came almost immediately, but Zoey ignored it.
She stomped through the yard, back to the house. She stewed in the kitchen until the towels were done, then threw them in the dryer, then stewed some more until they were dry, then folded them, then took the stack that belonged to her father into his bathroom and placed them in the proper cabinet.
And then, as she passed back through his bedroom, thinking about where to begin her search, she saw that the stack of books her father kept on his dresser had fallen over—the books he was reading, the books he would soon begin to read. A cascade of books across the top of the dresser, and one spine-up on the floor next to the wall.
That was an odd thing, given her father’s irritating tidiness. But then, it was an odd time on Sawkill, and perhaps not even Ed Harlow had wanted to stop and clean up his books on the way to search for a missing girl.
Zoey straightened the books on the dresser, then leaned down to pick up the fallen one. Glanced to the right on her way back up. Froze.
Leaned slowly back down.
In the chasm between the dresser and the wall, there was a door. A door cut into the wall, fastened shut with a tiny silver combination lock.
Zoey set the book on the dresser and stood there for a moment. Maybe it was like the not-Marion. Maybe it was a not-door. She’d look again, and it would be gone.
She held her breath. She looked again.
No, still there—a door, hidden behind a dresser Zoey wasn’t sure she could move. She stood there staring at it, wiggling her fingers. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to summon up the same furious, electric sensation she’d experienced behind the police station.
Come on, come on, she muttered—half-ready for the return of that incredible strength, half-dreading it. Some dresser-shoving power would come in real handy right about now.
But her arms, her hands, her skin all remained disappointingly mortal.
She sighed and glared at the ceiling. Whatever strength had surfaced before, it apparently was no longer interested in helping her. Maybe it had been like one of those situations when a mother, in a fit of maternal fury, lifts up a car to save her baby? Was Zoey the mother and Marion the baby?
She shook her head. Focus.
She had to move the dresser. She had to. She checked her phone: eleven thirty, and a text from Grayson, and another from Marion. Her father would be home at noon.
She ignored the texts, slipping her phone into her pocket.
She considered emptying everything from the drawers; the dresser would be easier to move. But she doubted her ability to put everything back in its place, and her father would notice.
Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe she’d confront his sorry ass the moment he walked in the door.
But . . . just in case.
With the dresser full, it took her a solid five minutes to move it away from the wall. She crouched in front of the door, stared at the combination lock. Four numbers.
She tried his birthday. Her birthday. Her mom’s birthday. Her grandparents’ birthdays. Every permutation of the numbers she could think of. She tried the code that locked his phone, the code that locked her phone. The code for the garage door. His ATM pin code, which she’d learned while spying on him when she was eleven. He’d never changed it.
She glanced at her phone: 11:38.
“Come on.” She slapped her hand against the wall.
Then it hit her.
Shaking a little, she entered the numbers on the lock:
9-6-3-9.
Z-O-E-Y.
Surely not?
The lock clicked open.
With a tiny laugh, Zoey pulled on the latch. The door opened to reveal a wooden staircase leading down into darkness.
Shaking a little more now, she called Marion, and didn’t move until she heard Marion’s voice: “Hey, Zoey—”
“Yeah, hi. Listen.” Zoey sat on the edge of the threshold and swung her legs through. Her feet met the stairs. “I found a secret room in my dad’s bedroom, and I’m going inside.”
Silence. Then Marion said, “What the hell?”
“My thoughts exactly. Will you stay on the phone with me? In case . . . I don’t even know.” She laughed, feeling her way down the alarmingly steep stairs. No fancy light bulbs in this secret passageway. Dark flat carpet lined the walls. Zoey felt like she was climbing into the throat of a beast.
“I’m right here,” came Marion’s voice. “Keep talking. Tell me what you see.”
“I’m putting you on speaker, FYI. I need the flashlight.”
“What do you see?”
“A bunch of stairs.” Zoey glanced back over her shoulder, at the dim square of her father’s bedroom. “I guess my house has a basement?”
She followed the bobbing light from her phone, then hit the bottom stair. The floor was dirt, covered with loose wooden planks. The air felt damp, like after a soft rain.
She searched the room—packs of bottled water, boxes of supplies, a first aid kit.
Guns, hanging from racks on the wall.
“Cool, cool,” said Zoey, sounding a little shrill. “My dad is a secret survivalist, I guess?”
“What are you seeing?”
“Water, supplies, some automatic rifles, I think? You know. Typical bunker stuff.” Zoey crept carefully around the room, her heart pounding in her ears. “Can I just say that I’m really disturbed by the number of secret rooms on this island?”
“And how many of them we’ve found in the last few days?”
“It’s a rare talent we have. Wait, hang on.”
Zoey had found a computer. Not a particularly nice one, but then, Ed Harlow was not known for his technological savvy.
Above it, nailed to the carpeted wall, hung an enormous map of the world.
And beside the keyboard sat her father’s black book.
She stared at it, a tight, squeamish feeling blocking up her throat.
“Zoey?” Marion asked tensely. “Say something. Are you okay? What is it?” Zoey heard rustling. “I’m coming over there.”
“No, wait.” Zoey sat down in a swiveling desk chair. She switched on the desk lamp, turned on the computer. It whirred softly to life. Zoey touched her fingers to the black book’s soft leather cover. She would deal with that in a second.
First: the map. She snapped a photo of it.
“There’s a map of the world in here,” Zoey told Marion. “And it’s covered by a grid.”
“A grid? What do you mean?”
Zoey wasn’t sure. Red lines divided the map into sectors, each of them numbered in her father’s meticulous hand. Red dots scattered across the map like drops of blood.
“He’s divided the whole thing into numbered sections,” Zoey whispered. “And there are these red dots all over. Hundreds of them. They’re marking . . . cities, I guess? But not all of them are on cities.” She squinted, stretched up on her toes. There were too many details to absorb. She was standing in a secret room beneath her house. Her eyes glossed over the map like she had fallen into a dream. “Some of the dots are in the middle of nowhere. Some are in the ocean? There’s even one in Antarctica.”
Marion’s quiet question came like an explosion: “Is there one on Sawkill?”
Zoey’s eyes flew to the northeastern coast of the United States, to the patch of water that hugged Sawkill Rock.
A red dot stared back at her—bright and round in the island’s heart.
“Zoey?”
“Yeah.” Zoey shook her head, hand over her mouth. “Yes. There is one. There’s one on Sawkill.”
Marion exhaled. “But what does that mean?”
Zoey glanced at her phone and saw a notification:
A text from her father.
At Windham and Irongate, it read. Be ready to leave. We’re going to the police station.
“Shit,” Zoey spat. “Shit.”
“What is it? Zoey—”
“My dad will be home in two minutes. I’ve gotta go.”
Zoey hung up, turned off the computer and the lamp, ran for the stairs. She remembered that the desk chair had been pushed in, turned back, and shoved it into place.
The black book.
She hesitated, then grabbed it and tucked it into her pants, beneath her shirt. She fled up the stairs, ducked out the door, slammed it shut, and locked it.
The dresser.
If she took too long to move it, if her father came inside looking for her, how would she possibly explain this?
“Goddamn it,” she gasped, pushing the stupid ancient thing as hard as she could. The books fell over once more. She stepped back, sucked in a breath, and surged forward, prepared to ram her whole body into the dresser.
But it moved on its own, before she could reach it.
It slid across the carpet a good six inches, with Zoey still a foot away.
Zoey, expecting to hit the dresser, hit nothing instead, and stumbled forward until she caught herself on the dresser’s edge. A bookend crashed to the floor, and more books slid off right after it.
Her fingers tingled, hot and ready. Twin cords of energy thrummed up the back of her legs, joining at the dip of her spine and stretching like a single rushing current all the way up to the crown of her skull. She was on fire, but in a good way. She’d been ignited. She was sizzling.
Breathless, laughing a little, tearing up a little, she grinned down at her hands.
Then, from outside, a car door slammed.
Her ribs clamped around her lungs in sudden panic. She grabbed the toppled books, shoved them back into place, straightened them, turned, and ran.
Wait.
She froze at the bedroom door.
The books hadn’t been orderly. They’d been in a messy pile, which was the thing that had caught her attention in the first place. One had been on the floor. But which one?
She riffled furiously through her memory until the image of the fallen book returned to her, settling back into place like a key into a lock.
Down the hall and around the corner, the front door opened. “Zo? Did you get my text?”
“Yeah, one sec!” Zoey cried. “Putting away the towels!”
She untidied the books, hoped they looked right, then arranged the one that had fallen on the floor: A Wrinkle in Time. One of Zoey’s all-time favorites. She had endlessly bugged her father about reading it until, finally, about a month ago, he’d thrown up his hands and said with an aggrieved sigh, “Okay, fine, I’ll read it. But, Zo, please don’t be mad if I don’t like it.”
She had thrust the book into his hands. “I can’t promise that, my dude.”
Zoey wiped her forehead, took three deep breaths to try to calm down, then sauntered out of her father’s bedroom and around the corner, dusting off her hands with a flourish.
“Towels clean and folded and returned to their nests,” she proclaimed. “Who’s the best daughter in the world?”
Then she froze. Her father was standing at the front door, looking stricken. A hot prickly rush flooded her body. “Dad?”
“Another girl’s gone missing.” Every uttered word seemed to tug harder on the tired lines of his face. “Jane Fitzgerald.”
A flash—Jane under the Droop with Harry Windemeier, spiders dropping like dark snowflakes onto her skin.
Zoey stood in shocked silence, adrift, then distantly heard the crisp drum of her heartbeat and followed it back into herself.
“Oh, Dad.” She didn’t want to do it, not really, not now, but she would have, before discovering her father’s lair. It’s what he would expect, what he would hope for. Part of her wanted to confront him anyway, throw the book in his face and yell at him until he explained why he had a secret room, what the map meant, and why he was keeping it all from her.
Instead, she hurried forward, flung her arms around him. At least she didn’t have to fake the tremor in her voice. “Holy shit. What’s going on?”
“I wish I knew, Zo,” he whispered, and when his arms came around her, Zoey had to fight the urge to flinch away from his touch.