Forty-five minutes after fleeing her bedroom, Zoey hid in the shrubs down the street from her house, waiting for her father to leave.
She watched his patrol car drive down the street, stop at the corner, and turn west. Maybe heading for the docks, to pick up Agent Briggs?
Zoey peered out of the bushes and scanned her surroundings one more time. Honestly, she would have preferred to remain hidden in the shrubs, possibly forever. But if there was actually an FBI agent on the island, then Zoey needed to do a thorough search of her father’s secret room and remove anything incriminating or encoded or just plain weird before Briggs could start poking around and jump to terrible conclusions.
If, Zoey thought, Dad hasn’t removed it all already.
Zoey’s nose started to tingle. She rolled her eyes skyward until the feeling faded.
She did not have time to sit in the bushes and cry about how unfair it was that she had to worry about whether her father was lying and what he could be lying about.
She waited five more minutes, then hurried to their backyard, dropped off her bike, and slipped inside the house. She rushed to her father’s bedroom, heaved the dresser aside, unlocked the door, and held her breath, desperately hoping that the combination would still work—and it did, thank God, and maybe that meant her father wasn’t a terrible person or unforgivably weird or hiding something unforgivable, and that he did still love her, even if she had stolen his book, thank God, thank God.
Muttering a prayer of gratitude to the universe, Zoey climbed down the stairs. The carpeted walls swallowed away all sound. She switched on the desk lamp, then the computer. Next she opened the voice recorder on her phone, set it on the desk, and started searching the room.
“Hi, Future Zoey, this is Past Zoey,” she announced. “I’m looking through Dad’s secret room and I’m going to tell you all about it, so I don’t forget anything. And also because it’s super creepy down here, and I like the sound of my own voice. So.” She crouched by a stack of plastic tubs against the wall, tried to move them, couldn’t. Way too heavy. She found an old wooden chair, climbed onto the seat, opened the topmost crate.
“Ammunition,” Zoey said. “Bullets and shit I know nothing about. Great. Awesome. Closing that immediately.”
On a set of metal shelves: “About a million cans of beans and vegetables and fruit. Also, SPAM. Gross.”
Hanging on the wall: “Also, the guns. We can’t forget the guns. Five of them. Super. Fantastic.”
She returned to the desk and opened each drawer.
“Top drawers are just pens and notepads and tools,” Zoey dictated. “A hammer, screwdrivers, wires.” She sighed sharply. “I’m gonna be really pissed if he’s building a bomb.”
She moved to the deeper bottom drawers.
“Hanging file folders,” she said, thumbing through the nearest ones. “They’re packed with newspaper clippings, and some printed online articles. Each file’s labeled with a year. Not every year, there are gaps. And they go back to . . .”
She squinted at the last folder. “1923? 1929, 1935, 1941 . . . Wait. I know these dates.”
Then she saw the folder labeled 1975, and the spinning pieces of her mind settled and calmed.
1975. The year Evelyn Sinclair had disappeared.
She glanced through the other folders, scanning quickly.
“1986,” she whispered. There it was. “Fiona Rochester.” 1994? Yes. “Avani Mishra.” And 2002? Grace Kang?
She pulled the folder labeled 2002 from the drawer, laid it on the desk, opened it. A stark newspaper headline stared back at her:
BELOVED TEEN DISAPPEARS FROM IDYLLIC SAWKILL ROCK.
“Grace,” Zoey whispered, running her fingers lightly across the black-and-white photo of a beaming Grace Kang in her Sawkill Day School graduation robes. Zoey had seen the photo a hundred times while researching the missing Sawkill girls. Another copy of it was pinned to the hidden bulletin board under her mattress.
She collected all the folders from the drawer and stacked them on the desk.
“So, Future Zoey,” she said after a moment. “It’s not weird for my dad to have these files, right? He’s the police chief. Of course he would want to research this stuff. Obviously. Naturally. But then . . .” She approached the desk slowly. “There’s this map. Not just of Sawkill, but the entire world.”
She stared at it for a long time, then felt like kicking something, because staring at the map did nothing to illuminate the reason for it. She stalked around the room, pointedly ignoring the guns hanging on the walls. What could she do with the guns? It wasn’t illegal to own them, unfortunately, unless some of these were truly illegal weapons, but how was she supposed to know that? Regardless, it certainly didn’t look good, to have a secret underground room filled with guns. Zoey couldn’t imagine Agent Briggs would be particularly pleased.
She marched back to the desk, and then she saw the black book, sitting beside the computer.
She really didn’t have time to peruse the book. She needed to take it, and the files, and the freaky red map, and whatever else she could carry, and burn them all, and throw the ashes into the sea. Then if Briggs found the room, her father would just look like a plain old survivalist. Nothing strange or encoded to be found.
Zoey glared at the book, fear plugging her throat. “How am I supposed to know what’s suspicious and what isn’t?” she whispered to her dutifully recording phone. “How am I supposed to know if I can trust him?”
A thought she couldn’t bear to voice: What if he’s involved with something terrible?
Am I daughter, then, or am I citizen?
“Do I tell Briggs about all of this?” she muttered, sitting down at the desk and opening the book. “And what do I even tell him?” She started flipping through the pages of Latin text, past the first set of Collector illustrations, then past another dozen or so pages of text, and then landed on another collection of illustrations. These were meticulously rendered human figures: a white girl with pigtails, a black man wearing an old-fashioned tailored suit, a freckled man wearing overalls, an Asian woman in a beautiful flapper-style gown.
The illustrations grew darker and less faded as Zoey kept turning the pages, as though some had been recently added. And they all had one small detail in common:
Their eyes were round and white, like tiny headlights. No pupils. No irises.
Heart pounding, Zoey flipped back to the Collector drawings, just to check.
“Okay,” she said, snapping pictures. “Future Zoey, see what you make of this: both the monsters and the humans in this book all have the same eyes. Thora said the legend is that the Collector can assume different forms. So maybe these illustrations are of the different forms he can take?”
Zoey tried to imagine her father hunched over this book, underground in the dim lamplight, adding a sketch of a not-Marion with white eyes, and felt like she could quite possibly throw up.
She flipped the page, came across a chunk of pages filled top to bottom with cramped lines of Latin. Throughout the text were drawings, diagrams. Sketches of . . .
She peered closely, tilted the book toward the light, and saw a girl in scratchy silhouette. The girl carried a sword, her other arm thrust out with a rigid palm. A phrase scribbled beside her read: SEMPER TRES.
Zoey exhaled sharply. She was so sick of all the Latin. The Latin was creepy. It was a language of the dead.
She took a photo of the sword girl, then was about to turn the page when she noticed two things, one right after the other:
Her eye caught on a tiny line of English text sandwiched between the Latin, lettered in ink a little darker and sharper than the rest:
There is such a thing as a tesseract.
Zoey’s blood crawled hot-cold just underneath her skin.
“‘There is such a thing as a tesseract,’” she whispered. “Holy shit. Holy shit.”
It was a line from A Wrinkle in Time, the book her father had promised her he’d read, and, judging by the ink, this sentence had possibly been written recently.
A ping sounded from Zoey’s phone. She glanced over to see a text notification, from Marion:
i chose Thora because she was fascinated with me
Then, a second text:
i craved her obsession
And a third:
she tasted sublime