“Me?” I put my water bottle down on the cooler, then pulled my braid over my shoulder and started to fiddle with the end. “Science. Medicine, specifically. I want to be an oncologist.”
I wanted to save people like my mom. People who didn’t deserve to die. People whose families didn’t deserve to be left behind. But I figured that was too morbid for party banter.
“Wow. You’ve got your life mapped out. Impressive,” he said. There was a long moment of silence between us, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. We both sipped our drinks. “So, are you on holiday, or—”
I bit the inside of my cheek. “Yeah. We just got here yesterday.”
“We?” he asked.
“Me, my dad, my sister.” My heart skipped a beat. Talking about my family might mean I’d have to start recounting our cover story. I’d memorized the facts of our new life on the car ride down, but being able to pull off the lies was an entirely different story. “What about you?”
“Just arrived this morning,” he said. He finished his drink, took my empy bottle of water, and launched them at a nearby garbage bag, which was already overflowing with cups and cans. “I actually came over here to visit my uncle, who lives up in Boston, but there was a fire while I was there and the whole family was displaced.”
“Oh my gosh,” I gasped. “I hope everyone’s all right.”
“Yeah, we all managed to get out unscathed, miraculously,” he said, fiddling with a silver ring on his right hand.
“Good,” I replied, thinking of my own narrow escape back home. Not that I could tell him about that.
“Anyway, they decided to fly back to the UK until the repairs on the house were done, but I wasn’t ready to go back, so I figured I’d see a bit of the country first,” he explained.
“Oh. Cool.” This time the pause was awkward. I felt like I was supposed to elaborate on our vacation, but my tongue was tied. “We just…go away every year right after school lets out,” I improvised.
Our school year didn’t actually end for another week, but he had no way of knowing that.
“My family always goes to the beach on holiday,” Aaron said with a wistful smile. “Being here is making me miss my sister, I must confess. I don’t have anyone to go windsurfing with.” He looked me over curiously. “I don’t suppose you…?”
“Windsurf? No,” I scoffed.
“Then I’d love to teach you. What do you say?” he asked, his eyes brightening with excitement.
My heart thumped with nerves. I’d never been really big on diving into new things. With strangers. In strange places.
“I promise I’ll be gentle,” he joked, raising one hand. “Please? I really want to go, but I’d rather go with a friend. And you definitely seem like friend material.”
I blushed, flattered, then found myself imagining how Darcy would react if I told her I was going to go windsurfing. She’d probably laugh in my face with a “Yeah, right,” and the very thought made my skin burn. I didn’t want to be predictable anymore. I didn’t want to be the lame, boring, weak girl Steven Nell chose out of the crowd. I wanted to embrace this whole “Life is short” mantra, and if I was going to do that, it was time to start facing my fears and trying new things.
“All right,” I said. “Why not?”
“Fantastic!” he crowed. “Meet me at the bay beach tomorrow afternoon at two. There’s a rental place there. You can’t miss it.”
“I’ll be there,” I promised.
I heard my sister’s flirtatious laugh carry across the party and sighed as she practically fell into Joaquin laughing. A couple of girls nearby shot her annoyed looks. I wished she didn’t have to be so overt.
“Well, someone’s having fun,” Aaron said, following my gaze.
“You said you have a sister?” I asked, hoping to change the subject.
“And a brother,” he said. He stooped to pick up a rock and tossed it toward the water. “I tried to call them today for the first time in a while, but I couldn’t get any service.” He squinted as he looked at me. “I don’t suppose your cell works here, does it?”
I wouldn’t know, not having one in my possession. But the GPS had gone dead when we got here, my iPad still wasn’t working, and my father had said that even the landlines were screwed up. Maybe this is why the FBI had sent us here—there was no possible way for us to contact people from our old life and blow our cover. “Nope. Apparently the island is a dead zone.”
He sighed. “I was afraid of that.”
“Why was it the first time you’d called in a while?” I asked.
Aaron kicked at the sand. “That’s kind of a long story, but basically, I had this huge row with my father before I left, so I’ve been avoiding calling home.”
“Ah,” I said. “That makes sense.”
“Of course, the great irony of ironies, I finally feel ready to apologize and hash it out, and I can’t get through to him.” He shrugged.
Before I could respond, the girls he’d been talking to earlier rushed up to him with a loud squeal.
“There you are!” the brown-haired girl said, looping her arm through his.
“We thought we lost you!” her blond friend breathed, wobbling slightly in the sand. The red Solo cup in her hand was nearly empty.
“Here I am,” he said weakly, looking at me apologetically. “I’ll see you tomorrow!” he mouthed as they pulled him away.
“Okay!” I gave him a wave and an encouraging smile, which he replied to with a grimace, but I was sure he could take care of himself. At least, I hoped so.
Left alone again, I knocked my fists together, wondering what to do next. I checked on Darcy, hoping she might be getting bored, but she was staring up at Joaquin, rapt, as he gestured his way through a story. I let out a sigh and was about to turn away when I noticed Lauren, Krista, Kevin, Fisher, and Bea sitting facing the fire, drinks in hand. The flames cast dark shadows on their faces, and the tongues of flame made their eyes glow red. Not one of them was talking. Instead, they were all staring at me, unreadable expressions on their faces.
His face. Nell’s face. Spattered with blood. Glaring down at me. The flash of a knife. The twisted branch of a tree overhead. Someone screamed.
I sat down hard on the nearest cooler, gasping for air. Another flash. The scream had just been some random girl, running away from a couple of boys in the surf. I pressed my hand to my forehead and told myself it wasn’t real.
I focused on the hard cooler top beneath my thighs. The surf crashing in my ears. The warmth of the fire against my skin. It brought me back down to earth, but all I wanted was to be back at the house, reading my book in the safety of my third-floor room.
I pushed myself up, walked shakily over to Darcy, and touched her shoulder.
“Can we go now?” I asked quietly. “Please?”
“Rory, we just got here,” she said. Joaquin sipped his drink, studying me.
“Come on, Darcy. I came with you, now I need you to come home with me,” I whispered.
“Everything okay?” Joaquin asked, stepping closer to us.
“Rory,” Darcy said through her teeth, wide-eyed.
“But I—”
“If you want to go home, go. I’ll be fine,” she said a bit more loudly.
I stared at her. Right. Sure. She’d be fine. But what about me? I didn’t exactly relish the idea of walking back alone.
“We’re five steps from the house,” she said quietly, her tone placating. “Don’t worry. I won’t stay too late.”
I turned and looked up the beach at our house. It wasn’t really that far, and all the homes between here and there had lights on their back decks. Besides, if something happened to me, someone at the party would hear me scream. Hopefully.
“All right, fine. I’ll go. But be careful,” I said, leaning in toward her ear.
“God. Chill out,” she replied. Then she turned back to Joaquin. “So how exactly did you get into lifeguarding?”
I glanced back at the fire, an
d my eye fell on Tristan. Olive was talking to him, but he was looking right at me again, studying me, as if trying to read my thoughts. My heart started to pound in a shallow, fluttery way, and part of me wanted to just go over there and talk to him. Ask him what was with all the staring. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Maybe he wasn’t really staring at me. Maybe he just liked to stare. And all I’d do by confronting him was bring more attention to myself and come off like an egotistical idiot in the process.
So, instead, I turned my back on him and headed up the beach alone, my chin tucked into the high neck of my sweatshirt.
I’d gone about fifty steps when a gray mist started to swirl around my ankles. My heart skipped a startled beat, and then my feet entirely disappeared from view. The air around me seemed to be moving, curling in and out, undulating. Heart in my throat, I whirled to look back at the fire, but it was nothing more than a dull, glowing ball in the grayness. I couldn’t make out a single face, a single figure. The fog had rolled in and distorted everything.
I turned around again, feeling utterly disoriented, and quickened my pace. I couldn’t see more than two feet ahead, so I veered right, looking for a landmark. A set of stairs came into view, leading up to one of the houses, but it wasn’t ours.
The laughter came out of nowhere.
I froze in my tracks, and a chill sliced down my spine. The sound prickled my ears. It was exactly like the laugh from my nightmares. Exactly like Steven Nell’s.
“No,” I said under my breath. “No.”
It came again, closer this time. Cackling. As quietly as I possibly could, I started to run. The sand beneath my feet made me stumble and I reached out, ready to fall, but my hand hit something hard. A scream rose in my throat until I realized it was just a railing. A railing to another set of stairs. I had no clue whether it was our house or a neighbor’s, but at that moment I didn’t care. I tore up the steps, taking them two, three at a time. All that mattered was getting inside. Getting away from him.
As I reached the top of the stairs, I heard the laugh again. It hovered in the mist, nearly on top of me. I scrambled across the wood planks and found that I was on the deck to our house. After fumbling for the key in my pocket, I managed to slip inside and close the door behind me, turning the lock as fast as I could. The gray fog swirled against the windowpane as I backed away, leaving a wet trail of condensation. Just on the other side of the glass, the mist moved in tiny, bursting pulses. As if someone was out there, standing just inches away from me, breathing slowly in and out. In and out.
I turned and raced up the stairs to the second floor, my heart pounding in my skull. At the top of the steps I heard a noise and paused, clinging to the wallpapered corner. But this time, it wasn’t laughter. It was something else entirely.
Taking a breath, I tiptoed across the hall and stood outside the closed door of my father’s bedroom. He let out a sob so pained I felt it inside my heart. My father was in there, alone, crying. Yet another thing I hadn’t heard him do since the day we’d buried my mom.
I stood there, my hand on the door, and listened. Listened until the fear faded away. Until I started to realize how irrational I’d been. How I must have imagined it all. How I’d let a natural weather phenomenon freak me out to the point of panic. None of that was real. This was real. My father’s pain. His finally breaking down.
This was real. And as much as it hurt, standing there in the hallway, listening in on his grief, it gave me hope.
After breakfast the next morning, I decided to walk into town and see if I could find a newspaper. There wasn’t a single TV in the house, and I needed to know what was going on with the hunt for Steven Nell. Maybe the cops had found him. Maybe everything was fine and we could go home.
Just as I put my hand on the knob of the front door, I saw something move in one of the windows across the way.
“What’re you doing?”
My hand flew up to cover my heart. “Darcy! You scared me!”
“Well, why are you standing there frozen?” she asked, looking me up and down from the bottom step like she couldn’t believe she was related to someone so weird. She reached back to tie her hair into a high ponytail with a sparkly black and gold band. “You looked catatonic for a second. Did you have another flash?”
“No.” I couldn’t believe she knew what catatonic meant. “I was just about to go for a walk—check out the town.” I yanked the door open and paused. “Want to come?”
She narrowed her eyes. I was sure she was thinking the same thing I was thinking. The two of us hanging out together twice in less than twenty-four hours? Looked like hell had finally frozen over.
“Sure,” she said finally, grabbing her purse from the table by the door and almost knocking over the family photo in the process.
“Should we tell Dad we’re going out?” I asked.
“He went for a run, like, an hour ago,” she said as she slipped on her dark sunglasses.
“Really?” I asked, following her out the door and across the porch. “Again?”
“What? Like that’s so bizarre?” she asked. She opened the gate and strode through, not bothering to hold it for me.
“Dad hasn’t gone out for a run in about five years,” I told her. Leave it to Darcy not to notice. “Now he’s gone twice since we’ve been here.”
She lifted a shoulder, walking backward up the sunlit sidewalk. “Well, good for him. Maybe it’ll chill him out.”
Then she turned, flinging her hair, and walked ahead of me. As we reached the corner, I glanced back at the gray house, half expecting to see Tristan’s face in one of the windows, but it was still. The place looked deserted. Even so, I quickened my steps, trying to make it look like I just wanted to catch up with Darcy, not like I was scared. A middle-aged man on a bike rode by with a surfboard tucked under his arm, and he rang his bell as he passed. On the other side of the street, a guy in his early twenties was watering his small lawn. I took a deep breath of the uniquely scented air and tried to relax.
“What is that smell?” I mused. “Is it honeysuckle? Lavender? I can’t place it.”
Darcy inhaled. “I don’t know, but it’s nice.” She trailed her hand along the top of a neatly clipped rosebush growing along the sidewalk. “It’s kind of…”
“Soothing,” I supplied.
She tilted her head, considering. “Yeah. Like aromatherapy.”
We walked a couple of blocks, past colorful Colonial homes with flower gardens and porch swings and peach trees, each one more stunning than the last. It was all very pretty, but almost too perfect. Like someone had come in and told everyone to get their houses ready for the postcard photographer.
“So you never asked me how it went with Joaquin last night,” Darcy said.
“How did it go with Joaquin last night?” I asked.
“Amazing!” she answered, bending slightly at the knee. “He’s a lifeguard. How hot is that? And he works at this bar down by the bay, so we have that in common.”
“That’s cool,” I said.
“He is so beautiful, and he totally ate up the whole story about us being from Manhattan. He was fascinated,” Darcy said, clasping her hands under her chin and then swinging her arms wide. “Thank god they made us from someplace cool and not, like, Kansas City or something. I can’t wait to see him again.”
Well, at least she’d gotten our cover story out there. Maybe now everyone would know and I wouldn’t have to answer questions about our supposed past.
“That’s great, Darcy, really.” I was glad that she seemed to have forgotten all the attention Joaquin had showered on me when we’d first gotten there. And her anger toward me for it. Apparently, her Darcy charm had worked its magic.
As we turned up a side street and headed for the center of town, a cold breeze sent a skitter down my spine and I had an overwhelming feeling that I was being watched. I turned around slowly, checking each of the windows, but most of the curtains were drawn. There was nothing.
While I stood, Darcy had walked ahead and was almost at the top of the hill. I hugged myself as I passed an old, overgrown playground. It had two swings, one slide, and a set of rusty monkey bars. The fence was broken, and weeds had overtaken the one bench meant for watchful parents. It was the first ugly thing I’d seen on the island, and my steps automatically slowed again. One of the swings creaked back and forth in the ocean breeze, its tempo even, like a ticking clock.
Up ahead, Darcy turned left and disappeared from view. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a scrap of tan corduroy fabric stuck to one of the rusty fence links. The exact same color as the jacket Steven Nell was wearing when he’d attacked me.
My throat constricted with dread. I whirled around, but there was no one there. Pressing my lips together, I tugged the scrap of fabric free. Sewn into the wide wale were two small, square patches. One was checkered white and blue. The other was blue around the edge, with a white square inside of the outline and a solid red square at the center. They looked like flags sailors used to signal to passing boats. Nell hadn’t had anything like that on his jacket.
I took a deep breath and blew it out. I had to chill. Steven Nell didn’t own the only piece of tan corduroy on the planet. I pocketed the scrap and took off at a jog after my sister.
Ten seconds later, I skidded onto Main Street, where I could see the general store at the end of the block. In the park at the center of town, two men played boccie while the minstrel boy sang a reggae version of “The Remedy” under the banner advertising that Friday’s fireworks display.
The boy bopped his head as he sang and played his guitar. He’d drawn a crowd, and one guy was playing air drums to the beat. I saw Tristan and Fisher approach the group from the opposite direction, and my heart skipped. Every time I saw Tristan, it was like I was surprised all over again by how gorgeous he was—his blond hair grazing those insane cheekbones, his deep tan, his strong-looking arms. He glanced over at me, then quickly trained his attention on the singer. I blushed at being caught staring.