Gray Wolf Island

by Tracey Neithercott

  “No, you forgot to pack it,” Elliot says like that is a fact.

  I scrabble for my belongings, which are strewn throughout the itchy grass. “Were you there? No, Elliot Thorne, you most definitely were not.”

  “Who cares?” Charlie jumps to his feet. He’s constantly moving like his bones have been replaced by springs, but boredom makes him extra bouncy. “Ruby knows the poem. Let’s get the treasure already.”

  “Then we go west.” Elliot leads us across the windy cliff toward the thick woods that cover the eastern half of the island. Chipmunks and squirrels scurry across branches. A lonely hare bolts at the sight of us.

  We follow Elliot’s compass west for two hours, crunching over sticks and leaves and pinecones. Here the world’s the kind of green that belongs in tales of fairies and gnomes who hide beneath ferns or on the heads of flowers. Green grass, green leaves, green moss climbing the trees. If the air had color, it’d be smoky jade.

  “How far west is too west?” Charlie asks after another half hour.

  I recite the instructions from memory. “ ‘Head west, dear friend, if you want to have fun. Too far to the south, and your quest is done.’ ”

  “Thanks, Robert Frost, but that doesn’t actually answer the question.” Elliot drops his pack to the forest floor. He digs around, pulls out a rolled map. A dirty finger lands on the cliffs. “We started here. Where ‘the ocean beats its anger into the land.’ We hiked west, which should bring us to about here.”

  His finger taps a forested area close to the middle of the island. “What comes next?”

  “ ‘Go down to go up, pay no heed to the dead,’ ” I say.

  “Right. That’s the pit and the grave.” Elliot’s finger traces from the forest to the pit. “We’ll have to travel north. Once we hit the Kennemissic River, we can follow it up to the hole.”

  “Except the poem doesn’t tell us to go north,” I say.

  Charlie’s smile is an impish thing. “But it doesn’t tell us not to go north.”

  “All I’m saying is that maybe we should keep going west toward the Star Stones. They could be the ‘six, sturdy, solid, and true’ from the end of the poem.”

  Elliot studies the map. “Yeah, but the stanza that sent us west says, ‘Too far to the south, and your quest is done.’ The Star Stones are in the south.”

  Four sets of eyes turn to me. Pink creeps up my neck and over my cheeks. Sadie would have taken me aside, hands on my shoulders, and said, “How much does this matter, Rubes?”

  I’d say what I always said, which was “Not much at all.”

  And it doesn’t—we’re closer to the pit than the stones. I clear my throat. “I guess it couldn’t hurt to look for the symbol there.”

  Charlie grins. “So you’re saying we can still go to the hole? Because I really want to go to the hole.”

  “We go to the hole.”

  I’m thinking of a girl with my face and long auburn hair, bare feet on bark as she scales a twisty tree. I’m thinking of her hands on coarse rope, legs pinwheeling in open air. A drop, a splash. I’m thinking of her smile and the scent of sap and the crinkle of leaves when Elliot says, “Murder.”

  A branch thwacks me in the face. Ten feet ahead, Charlie jumps onto a fallen log. “I bet I’m the murder,” he says, slitting his eyes. “And one of you kills me.”

  “You’re disturbed,” Elliot says, pushing him off the log.

  “Ruby found the map in Bishop Rollins’s copy of Treasure Island. You don’t think he went through all those books before? The guy was the biggest believer Wildewell has ever seen.” Gabe hikes his backpack higher on his shoulders. “No, Ruby found the book with the poem because sometime after Bishop Rollins died, the hole had its third death.”

  “That’s not how the legend goes,” Anne says. “It’s three deaths for the treasure, not the map. We could still be waiting on the murder.”

  “No,” Elliot says. “I can feel it. The treasure’s waiting for us.”

  “Yeah, waiting for one of us to be murdered.” Charlie swats away a massive blackfly. “I’m talking about me, by the way.”

  “The pit has probably seen dozens of murders over the centuries,” I say. “Besides, if it happened recently, someone would have reported a missing person. That sort of news doesn’t sneak around Wildewell.”

  It’d be the talk of town. People don’t go missing from Wildewell. They hardly leave at all. Doris says the air on the outskirts is thicker than the rest, so when you try to get by, you’re reminded you don’t really want to leave.

  It happened once, though. But nobody talks about Elliot’s little brother, who disappeared on a foggy morning when I was twelve years old. Later that same day, his dad blew his brains all over the beach.

  “Maybe it was a tourist,” Gabe says. “Someone nobody knew.”

  “Hmmm,” Anne says with a tilt of her head. “First, lunch. Then I’ll tell you something you don’t know.”

  Fifteen minutes later, we’re shedding our socks and shoes beside the river that will lead us to the pit. It’s hemmed in by moss-covered rocks. A flat one holds an otter, who’s tossing a stone between his paws, oblivious to our arrival. Another otter waits in the river below, lolling on his back in a spot of sun.

  It’s the single most adorable thing I’ve seen in my entire life.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile so hard,” Elliot says from beside me. “I’m a little worried, to be honest.”

  “You don’t understand, Elliot. They’re otters.” I place a palm to each cheek, feel the heat rising from all the excitement. “Did you know they sometimes hold hands while they float?”

  “I did.”

  “If they start doing that, I won’t make it to the treasure because I’ll be here. Dead.”

  “This…” He chokes back a laugh. “This is not how I imagined you at all.”

  I take a deep breath. The air has that sunny scent you can only catch on very hot days. “I know. It’s a weakness I hide well.”

  Elliot nods. “At least it’s not cats.”

  “Cats are the worst,” I say. It’s the one fact Sadie and I ever debated.

  “They really are. They’re like the scheming overlords of the animal kingdom.”

  I give him the kind of smile only shared between two people who desperately hate something and thoroughly enjoy hating it together.

  “When I’m rich from the treasure, I’m buying a house with a river and a whole romp of otters—that’s my favorite word for a group of them—and I’ll wear T-shirts with floating otters instead of cat faces.”

  He bumps my shoulder. “I’ll buy you an otter shirt when we get home. And I won’t even make fun of you for wearing it.”

  And that’s the moment I start to not hate Elliot Thorne.

  Anne removes her shirt as she walks to the river, revealing a lime-green sports bra. Gabe stays silent but trips on a tree root as he rushes for the muddy shore. His cheeks go rosy, and his ears aren’t far behind. Anne fixes him with a stern look. “Be a gentleman, Gabriel.”

  “Whatever,” he says, voice tight with something like shame.

  I dip my water bottle into the river and add a filtration tablet. A deep drink, then I’m sinking my feet into the clear water, letting it chill me from toe to head. I shiver despite the sticky sweat that covers my skin.

  “The Kennemissic River.” Anne floats on her back, dark hair fanning around her. “There’s a Wildewell legend about it, you know. An island surrounded by salty sea with only a trickle of water to drink from. Two pirate ships crashed into Gray Wolf Island, sometime after dehydration drove my ancestors to the mainland and before the island called them back. The crew that made it to the small spring first was a cruel and greedy lot, threatening a sword through the stomach for anyone who tried to steal a sip. Crazed with dehydration, a trio of pirates bartered the cook’s daughter—a Jamaican girl who’d stowed away when the ship left port—for a few drops to drink.

  “The girl k
new her fate. Not in a Charles Kim way, but in the way all girls know their fate when faced with dirty smiles and eager hands. And as the merciless pirate captain’s fetid breath smacked against her cheek, she discovered water.”

  “She used a desalination process to turn salt water into drinkable water?”

  “Elliot, please,” Anne says. “This is a legend, not a science lesson. So, no, she didn’t do that. She let out a cry so deep and powerful it quaked the island and broke the earth. Water filled the fissures, creating the Pontegwasset River in the west and the Kennemissic River here in the east.”

  “I wish there’d been a sword fight,” Charlie says.

  I don’t. I like that one girl’s voice could rattle the world.

  “Let’s eat,” Anne says, emerging from the river like a drowned nymph. She pushes wet hair from her eyes and teeters as her bare feet navigate the rocky bank. “Then I’ll tell you where you went wrong.”

  This sounds both promising and ominous, but none of us question her. Elliot follows me to a fat log that spans the width of the river. Part of me wants to turn back, head south to the Star Stones. But even I can’t deny that “go down to go up” sounds a lot like instructions for the pit. I hang my feet over the side of the log and watch as Charlie pulls himself to a rocky ledge ten feet over the river. He releases a roar that could shake the leaves.

  “Calm the hell down, Charlie,” Elliot says. “What’s wrong with you? You said you’re going to die here.”

  “But,” Charlie says, toeing the edge of the rock, “I’m not going to drown.” And then he’s plunging into the water feetfirst, a straight line of skinny boy. I have a fleeting thought that maybe he’s wrong, that maybe this is how Charlie dies, but he kicks to the surface and hoots again. He smacks Elliot off the log before splashing out of the water and onto the grass.

  Gabe rifles through his bag, all shirtless and glistening. He looks like the sort of thing you might collect and polish every so often just to make sure it doesn’t get scuffed. Elliot lounges beside him, bare-chested and graffitied up. Skin full of stories—that’s what Sadie would say. I’m feeling particularly literary at the moment, so I quickly look away.

  Gabe hands us each a protein bar and some beef jerky, crackers, and dried fruit, and I’ve never wanted ice cream more in my life.

  “The problem with your murder,” Anne says, twisting her head to tear at her jerky, “is it doesn’t account for love.”

  Gabe turns to Elliot. “What’s she talking about?”

  “Love, Gabriel. I’m talking about love.” She closes her eyes and rubs her head with a sigh. It’s something my dad does when he’s exasperated, but it looks odd coming from this delicate girl. “There’s more to the legend about these deaths.”

  “We know,” Elliot says. “Accident. Suicide. Murder. Three deaths before the pit reveals the treasure.”

  “The island, not the pit. And that’s only part. Bishop Rollins told my great-grandmother the truth.” She frowns at Elliot. “How is it you don’t know this?”

  He huffs. “I’m a Thorne, not omniscient.”

  “But Bishop—”

  “Knew the truth. Which is?”

  She holds Elliot’s gaze before continuing. “First, a ruse that results in an accident.”

  “Nineteen twelve,” he says. “An excavation team thought they’d hit the bottom of the pit at a hundred and twenty feet, but the thing was booby-trapped and the floor dropped. The pit flooded and a worker, Clarence Goldhammer, drowned.”

  Anne nods. “The second: suicide from despair.”

  “Nineteen seventy-four. Michael Harwell sank close to a million dollars into excavating the site, but after ten years they’d found nothing and Harwell went bankrupt. He spent a final night on the island, where he chased a bottle of pills with a bottle of vodka.”

  “But that’s not the real story.” Anne lies back on the grassy riverbank. “Michael Harwell left the island that night, checked into the Wildewell Inn, and overdosed there. So you see, the deaths are tied to the island, but they don’t necessarily happen at the hole.”

  “What about your dad?” Charlie says. Elliot’s head jerks up, and a hard look settles over his face. I had the same thought, only I wasn’t brave enough to ask. It seems, though, that Patrick Thorne’s particular bloodline might have given him the unquenchable thirst for Gray Wolf Island treasure that Thornes are known for and that maybe he felt so hopeless about his search that he decided to swallow a bullet.

  Elliot’s voice is cold enough to ice the river. “No. It wasn’t my father.”

  “Elliot’s right,” Gabe says to Charlie with a long look that says a whole lot more. “Mr. Thorne gave up on the treasure a long time before he died. Harwell is our suicide.”

  Charlie nods. Elliot attempts to soften his glare.

  Anne’s hands flutter at her hair. “Right, so we have a suicide. Perhaps I should go on?”

  “The murder,” I say.

  This seems to snap Elliot out of his angry trance. “Ruby and Gabe have a point. Even if the murder happened off the island, it had to have been a tourist or someone from long ago whose death went unrecorded.”

  “But you see, just like the others, there’s more to the legend,” Anne says. “Love. The last death is a murder out of love.”

  I’m frozen. I expect my heart to race, but it’s covered in ice crystals and barely beating. I’ve stopped breathing, but if I did exhale, I’d leave smoky puffs of cold in the air. It’s one thing to wonder at the truth. It’s another thing entirely to know.

  But I always knew, didn’t I? I knew the island needed three deaths. I knew it’d had its murder. I’m not like the boys or Anne. I wouldn’t have come to Gray Wolf Island if I didn’t know there’d be a treasure.

  “Maybe it was a stalker,” Charlie says. “Like, I love you so much I’m going to go completely psycho on you and kill you so no one else can have you.”

  And I’m a liar, so I say, “I think I read something like that. In the newspaper.”

  I lie because I have to. Because I can’t tell them. I can’t tell anyone.

  GO DOWN TO GO UP,

  pay no heed to the dead.

  If you’re on the right track,

  You’ll see gray wolves ahead.

  When it’s over, when I’m on the mainland with a few thousand gold coins, maybe I’ll remember the hike. But right now there’s only this: dark hair weighed down with water, childlike hands flittering in the air, and lips that form the words murder and love.

  In death, Sadie unlocked the door to a mystery she’d spent years trying to solve, and yet here I am, shuffling over fallen leaves and crooked tree roots while she’s lying under a weeping willow and six feet of dirt. The reality of that is about the only thing left in my head.

  Guilt whispers in the wind that shakes the trees. Its harsh voice pushes me farther into the forest. Farther, farther, until the whisper turns to warbling.

  Ruby Caine with the sin-blacked soul

  had a sister, but let her go.

  Gripped in her hand a sharp sharp knife

  and Ruby Caine took her sister’s life.

  “That’s not what happened,” I say, though I’m not sure the difference really matters.

  “I’m a little strange,” Anne says, startling me out of my thoughts. “You might have noticed. But I’m a talented listener. If you want to talk about it—the thing making you wander off on your own.”

  I blink away gritty dirt. It’s just me and Anne and swaying pines. I twirl in a circle. “I don’t know how I got here.”

  “Your problem isn’t that you don’t know how you got where you are. It’s that you don’t know how to get where you need to be going.” Times like these, I get the sense she’s ageless—or every age all at once. “Fortunately for you, I never get lost. Now talk.”

  Her stride is short, but she’s fast, and I hurry to catch up. Now that she’s not staring at me, it’s easier to say what’s on my mind. “Can people who do bad
things ever redeem themselves?”

  “Do you mean one person who does multiple bad things or multiple people who each do one bad thing?”

  “A single person who does one bad thing.”

  Anne stops short. I nearly topple her, but steady myself before we both go down in a tumble of backpacks and limbs. “You can redeem yourself.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  She cuts me off with a shake of her head. “I don’t know what you did, Ruby, but I don’t believe you’re a lost cause.”

  I nod. Bat away a stray tear. Without another word, she scrambles over a log and pushes between two tight trees to reveal three boys making war with acorns. For the first time in a year, I understand why Sadie wanted more for me. Maybe she was right all along.

  My skin’s slicked with sweat when the path appears. It’s rutted and dusty, much of it covered in tall grass and weeds that itch my ankles. Blackflies nearly the size of bees bite my bare skin.

  But after snaking alongside the river for hours, I think the path is downright beautiful.

  We’re betting the trail was worn by centuries of treasure hunters traveling between the pit and the river for a quick plunge into cool water. “This is it,” Elliot says. “I can feel it.”

  Ten minutes later, we break through the forest. A dilapidated wooden shack welcomes us to a land of dirt, dry stone, and abandoned metal, its door waving on its hinges. We pass an empty dumpster with rust climbing its sides, some chicken wire rolling against the ground, and a hammer with a split handle. Lording over the lifeless spot of land is a white cross going brown.

  Elliot grins at me. “Say it, Ruby.”

  It’s the grin that has me shouting it loud. “ ‘Pay no heed to the dead’!”

  Charlie responds with this adorably awkward victory dance that breaks what heart’s left in me because it’s one more thing about him I’m going to miss when he’s gone.

  We continue on the path, faster now. A mound of dirt blocks our view, but only for an instant, and then we’re there, toeing the soil that surrounds a gaping hole in the earth.