by Ginger Zee
For a split second, Helicity was too overcome to react. Then she hurled herself into Sam’s arms. Laughing, he wrapped her in a crushing embrace. She’d been hugged countless times in her life, by Andy, her parents, Mia, and others. But none had felt as powerful—as right—as this one. She wanted it to go on forever.
“So what do you think?” Sam said, dropping his arms but still standing close. “Time to head home?”
“Yes!” she said with a joyful laugh.
“No!”
Trey’s cry startled Helicity. She’d been so caught up in her excitement that she’d momentarily forgotten he was there. But now she saw the hurt in his eyes. “I mean, what’s the big rush?” he asked.
Helicity bit her lip. “You don’t understand. Lana…she saved my life and ever since…Trey, I never even got to thank her!” She eased down next to him. “I’m sure we won’t be leaving for a few days yet, but the sooner we can get back to see her, to make sure she’s really okay, the better.”
Trey’s face fell, but he nodded. “Yeah. I guess that’s more important than anything…or anyone…down here.”
Helicity didn’t reply. Denying it would have been a lie; agreeing would have meant hurting Trey’s feelings more than she already had. She liked him far too much to do that.
The ferry docked in Bolivar a few minutes later. Sam had left his car at the far end of the ferry parking lot. He hurried over to it. “You coming, Fifteen?”
“Helicity! Trey! Over here!” Mrs. Valdez had pulled up close to save Trey the extra steps. Now she was waving to them from her car window.
Helicity looked uncertainly from one vehicle to the other.
“Go on,” Trey finally said.
“I’ll call you later,” Helicity promised. Then on impulse, she raised up on her tiptoes and kissed Trey on the cheek. “I’m so glad you were my first date,” she whispered.
“I wish we had time for more,” Trey answered. Then he smiled, and his usual sunny disposition shone its warmth on her. “But hey, you’re not gone yet. And there’s always texts and Facebook, right?”
Helicity smiled back. Then she made her way to where Sam was waiting.
“All good?” Sam asked casually as she slid into the seat beside him.
“Good enough,” she answered.
He shot her a quick look but didn’t ask anything more. Instead, he started the car and headed out onto the main road. When Sam learned she hadn’t had dinner, he drove through a local burger joint. She tried to give him her last ten dollars to pay for the meal, but he waved it off and parked in a spot so she could eat without being jostled about.
As she munched on her fries, something occurred to her. “Andy! Does he know?”
Sam gave a snort of laughter. “I texted him a bunch of times, but you Dunlaps must have a genetic defect about texting back because he hasn’t replied.”
“I’ll try calling him.” Helicity licked her fingers clean, pulled out her phone, and thumbed her way to Andy’s phone number. When Andy’s phone went to voice mail, she hung up, intending to text him instead. Then Sam held up a finger.
“Wait. Try him again. Then listen.”
When Helicity redialed, she didn’t hear anything at first. Then her ears picked up a faint chirping. “That’s the ring tone Andy assigned me.” She couldn’t locate the source before the sound stopped. Then something Andy had said in the hospital a few days ago came back to her. “Hold on. Is his duffel bag in the trunk?”
“He usually tosses it there before heading to work, so it should be.”
“I bet he left his phone inside it. Can you pop the trunk?” She redialed Andy’s number again and climbed out of the car. In the trunk, Andy’s duffel bag sat in a rumpled lump on top of the camping gear, the phone inside chirping away like a trapped bird. Rolling her eyes, Helicity unzipped the zipper.
“Ugh!”
The ripe odor of unwashed clothes made her reluctant to touch anything, but she poked at the pile with a finger. She hit something hard. His phone, she assumed, until she pushed aside a dirty sock and found his orange pill bottle lying beneath it. A handful of pills rested inside the plastic container. She was about to keep searching when the name on the bottle’s label leaped out at her. It wasn’t Andy’s name.
It was Mia’s.
She stared at it uncomprehendingly. How did Mia’s pill bottle get in Andy’s duffel bag?
“Did you find it?”
Helicity jumped. Sam was out of the car and coming around to the back. Quick as lightning and without thinking why, she snatched up the bottle and hid it in her cupped hand as she yanked the zipper closed.
“No,” she replied with false cheeriness. “It’s buried in his bag with some really nasty laundry. I’ll make Andy dig it out himself. But since he doesn’t have his phone,” she added as an idea struck her, “maybe we could track him down at that house he’s painting.”
Sam nodded. “Worth a shot.”
Helicity slipped the pill bottle into her purse when Sam wasn’t looking. She was still trying to understand how it had gotten into Andy’s bag when they pulled up in front of an older house. Unlike newer construction, this one was raised only a few feet from the ground. A thickset man in a paint-speckled T-shirt, shorts, and baseball cap was loading equipment—ladders, buckets, brushes, and tarps—into the back of a van.
“Help you with something?” he drawled when Helicity and Sam approached.
“We’re looking for Andy,” Helicity replied. “Is he around?”
“No Andy here.” The man tipped back his hat and scratched his head. “Unless you mean Drew?”
Helicity grimaced at the name. “Yes. Drew. Is he here?”
“Not since Monday, no. Had to let him go for slacking off. That, and he tracked white footprints on the deck.”
Helicity blinked. “But…he fell off a ladder here on Tuesday.”
The man snorted. “Not here he didn’t. And not likely at any other paint job, either. Word gets around about bad workers, see.” He narrowed his eyes. “Why you so interested in finding him, anyway? He owe you money, too?”
“Owe me money?” Helicity repeated faintly.
The man shrugged. “None of my business, of course, but I overheard him telling that guy who gives him rides not to worry, that he’d come up with the cash.”
“That guy.” Helicity swallowed hard. The burger and fries felt like lead weights in her stomach. “What did he look like?”
“Blond. Skinny. Wore a necklace with beads on it.”
“Not beads,” Sam said grimly. “Shark teeth.” He looked at Helicity. “Johnny.”
She nodded, not trusting herself to speak. Sam had one more question, though. “Do you give your workers cell phones?”
The man looked at him like he was crazy. “Oh, you mean in case there’s a big paint emergency or something?” he scoffed.
Back in the car, Helicity stared blankly out the windshield. Her mind was spinning.
All her life, she had felt a bond with her brother, a trust and love that no one and nothing could ever shatter. But now his lies—about his phone, his fall, his job—had cracked that bond.
Nobody tells anyone everything, Sam had warned her.
What else has he been hiding from me?
She knew the answer even before she asked herself the question. Like land mines waiting to explode, the evidence was all there. His erratic moods. His disturbed sleep. His friendship with Johnny. His abrupt departure from Michigan. Odd moments back home that she had dismissed or taken little notice of, but that now, looking back, took on significance. And the biggest land mine…the orange pill bottle burning a hole in her purse.
Sam climbed into the driver’s seat, breaking into her thoughts. “Listen,” he said as he started the car and pulled onto the road, “I’m sure there’s a perfectly good explanation for all…this.” He whirled a hand in the air.
Helicity clutched Lana’s necklace, needing to feel the certainty of its solidness, the sharpness o
f its jagged edges. “There is an explanation.” Her voice was raw. “But it’s not a good one. In fact, it’s bad. It’s really, really bad.”
She withdrew the bottle and stared at the little white pills inside.
“I think…I think Andy stole Mia’s painkillers. And our money. And I think he did it because he’s addicted.”
Sam yanked the steering wheel to the side, braked to a hard stop on the road’s shoulder, and switched off the engine. “What?”
Wordlessly, Helicity handed him the bottle. As he scanned the label, his expression morphed from disbelief to confusion to understanding and, finally, to anger.
“Idiot! Complete, total idiot!” He swore and hurled the bottle against the dashboard. It ricocheted back onto the seat and bounced to the floor, the pills rattling inside the orange plastic like a maraca.
“I know,” Helicity said tearfully. “Andy—”
“Not Andy,” Sam interrupted. “Me. For not realizing it sooner. It’s all so obvious now, isn’t it? The way he’s been acting, how he’s been avoiding you—everything.”
Helicity said nothing. Not because she thought Sam should have known what was going on, but because she blamed herself for ignoring what was right in front of her.
They sat in silence, the ticking of the engine and the occasional car speeding by the only sounds. Sam restarted the car when the sun threatened to turn the interior into a sauna. The pill bottle rolled as they moved onto the road. For one brief moment, Helicity thought about crushing it beneath her foot. Destroying the evidence and forgetting she’d ever seen it. Instead, she picked it up and returned it to her purse. When Sam shot her a questioning look, she murmured, “I have to confront him with it. Otherwise, he’ll just lie to me again.”
“And what about Suze and Mia? Will you show it to them, too? Or tell your parents?”
Tears pricked Helicity’s eyes at the thought of what they might say or do. “I know I should. But I want to see Andy first. Give him a chance to explain.”
Sam’s mouth tightened into a thin line of disagreement, but he nodded.
They drove in silence straight to the campsite. If Andy was going to show up anywhere, it would be there.
The sunlight had faded by the time they got the tents up, but Andy still hadn’t appeared. Helicity sat on the beach, digging her toes into the warm sand and listening to the shush of the waves. Her purse, its contents like a ticking time bomb, was in the sand beside her. She tried to imagine the conversation she would have with Andy about the painkillers. About everything. But it was impossible. Such a conversation was uncharted territory where her mind refused to go.
“Hey.” Sam sat down beside her. “I should take you back to the Beachside. Mia and Suze are probably wondering where you are. You can do Andy’s laundry, use it as a reason to come back here later.”
A few minutes later and with Andy’s duffel over her shoulder, Helicity made her way up the stairs to the Beachside kitchen. She expected Mia to bombard her with questions about her date with Trey the moment she walked through the door.
Instead, she found her friend hunched over her half-eaten dinner at the kitchen island, talking to Suze in low, tense tones. For one heart-stopping moment, she thought they’d learned the truth about Andy and the break-in. “Everything all right?” she asked tentatively.
Suze straightened. “We just heard that the tropical storm has strengthened to a hurricane. A Cat-2. They’re predicting it will grow even stronger in the next twenty-four hours.”
Helicity knew tropical storms could amass great power in a short period of time, given the right conditions. Still, she was shocked that this one had grown so strong so quickly.
“Do the computer models have it tracking this way?”
Hurricane forecasters typically generated two types of models. Most people see the displays as colorful spaghetti plots on TV. Those spaghetti plots followed the dozens of computer models produced by gathering all available data—from satellites, dropsondes lowered into the storm by hurricane hunters—to diagram the different paths a storm might take. The ends of the strings were joined together at the storm’s current location, then squiggled apart like spaghetti strands to show each possible track. The second model, known as the cone of probability, was the National Hurricane Center’s official storm scenario. It plotted the hurricane’s most likely position and strength at intervals ranging from 24 to 120 hours in the future. Everyone living within the cone was warned of the storm’s potential impact.
Mia nodded grimly. “Most of the models have the hurricane coming here. Maybe even as soon as tomorrow night.” She lowered her eyes and traced a vein in the island’s granite surface. “Lucky for me, I’ll be home by then.”
Helicity startled. “What?”
Mia looked up. “After the derecho, I called my mom. Not just to tell her I was okay. To tell her I wanted to come home. So…she booked me a ticket. I was supposed to leave Monday but now I fly out tomorrow morning.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t hate me, Hel,” Mia said miserably. “I already feel like I’m abandoning you. But the truth is, I’m glad to be going. With the derecho, and now this hurricane—Hel, I’m not like you. The thought of being caught in another storm makes me want to throw up.”
“No, no! It’s totally okay,” Helicity hastened to assure her, “because I have some news, too.” She quickly filled her in on Lana’s status and the plan to head home. “It sounds like we’ll all be getting out in the nick of time.”
“Speaking of getting out,” Suze put in, “tell Sam and Andy to crash here for the night. The beach is no place to camp out with a major storm looming. And I could use their help boarding up the windows. Just as a precaution,” she added with a reassuring glance at Mia. Helicity imagined how prone the Beachside had to be to hurricane damage. How scared Suze must be, since the Beachside was not just her moneymaker, but her home.
Helicity promised to tell the boys, then carried Andy’s duffel bag to the laundry room. As she was halfway through feeding the dirty clothes into the washer, his phone clattered to the floor. She picked it up when the washer was going, flipping it around in her hands and arguing with herself about whether or not to spy on its contents.
The need for information won out. What she hoped to find, she didn’t know. But accessing Andy’s phone seemed the best, and maybe the only, way of discovering something that might help her understand what he’d been up to, if not why. So, when the black screen sprang to life under her thumb, she swallowed her guilt and took her best guess at his password: Brady12, the last name and uniform number of his favorite quarterback.
It worked. Wow, is he predictable. That was way too easy. The tiny screen flooded with messages and texts—from her, from Sam, from their parents. She scanned through them, and through his phone log and contact list, too. She noted with dismay that Andy hadn’t been returning their parents’ calls. There were no communications from Johnny, which confirmed her theory that that’s what Andy’s other phone was for. Unfortunately, nothing on his family phone hinted at where he might be, what he might be doing, or whom he might be doing it with.
As a last resort, she checked his photo cache. At first glance, it seemed just as useless. Then she spotted a bizarre picture of an old rusty-looking doorway sealed with an equally rusted padlock.
What the heck? She zoomed in. The door was nothing special, just a dinged-up slab of wood or metal with an X-shaped reinforcement riveted to the front. Why would he have taken a pic of that?
After studying it a few moments, she concluded the doorway was most likely located somewhere at Fort Travis, an old military fortification near the ferry terminal. Originally built to safeguard the entrance to Galveston Harbor, the fort and surrounding land was now a public park, though many of the concrete buildings had fallen into disrepair and were blocked off for safety reasons. When Helicity learned that Bolivar residents had sheltered there during Hurricane Carla in 1961, she convinced Trey, Sam, and Mia to roam around
the low hillsides, grassy expanses, and dilapidated buildings one afternoon.
She didn’t remember seeing Andy’s doorway at the fort. All she knew was that it had to have some meaning for him to photograph it. So she texted it to her own phone. Then she slipped both devices into her purse with the pill bottle.
As she came out of the laundry room, she heard new voices. The Gibsons, she realized. She grimaced when she recognized the loudest voice as Cyn’s—the last person she wanted to see just then.
In the kitchen, Mia was pretending to be engrossed in a magazine. “They’re leaving tonight!” she whispered gleefully. “And I’m ninety-nine percent sure Cyn’s talking to Sam. I mean, Sammy.” Mia rolled her eyes and smiled at the same time.
Cyn was on her cell on the deck, but the girls could hear every word. “Why did you ditch me for that immature little girl this afternoon?” she yelled in outrage.
“She means you,” Mia reported.
“Yeah. I got that. Shh.”
Whatever Sam said next turned Cyn’s face ugly. “Well, excuse me,” she snarled. “I didn’t realize she was so important.”
Mia raised her eyebrows at Helicity. “What’s this now?”
Helicity flushed, then excused herself to change out of her dress. Downstairs, Cyn’s bedroom door slammed shut so hard, Suze’s knickknacks trembled.
Helicity’s phone buzzed as she was tugging a T-shirt over her head. It was a text from Sam. Before she opened the message to read it, she had a pang of guilt. She shouldn’t feel this way about two guys. Not at the same time. Why was she so happy to hear Cyn yelling at Sam? Why was she so pumped to see Sam’s name immediately pop up on her phone? She fought off the feeling of “winning” that was consuming her, and when she touched her finger to the home button and the message revealed itself, guilt turned to anguish.
Andy’s here. Better come.
Before she could respond, a second message appeared. Just a single word that crackled with urgency:
Hurry.
She grabbed her purse and ran.