by Rio Youers
“It seems strange,” she said, knuckling one of those tears away, “that no one here will mention us—that our names will be erased.”
“Another of Valerie’s silly rules,” Angela remarked.
“It’s to preserve the status quo,” Nolan said, buckling his own lifejacket. He made a slight adjustment to accommodate the object he had strapped between his actual jacket and the left side of his ribcage. “If the people here talk about you, they’ll invariably think about the mainland and if the grass is any greener over there. This creates doubt and turmoil, which can be damaging.”
“To whom?” Angela asked.
“To Halcyon.” Nolan fished the boat key from his pocket. “Like any society, it needs good, hardworking people in order to thrive. If everybody scampers off to the mainland because they believe it’s all sweetness and light, then everything here is going to collapse.”
“Then it’ll just be you and Valerie,” Angela said. “And won’t that be sweet?”
“What’s sweeter is providing a safe and comfortable community where disillusioned Americans can restructure their lives.” Nolan offered a beaming, disingenuous smile—a little something he’d picked up from Mother Moon over the years. “There’s a reason for all of Valerie’s ‘silly’ rules, you know.”
This was true, but the reasons were not as altruistic as Nolan suggested. There were certain precarious pieces to consider—pieces like Garrett Riley and Glenn Burdock. Rules had to be implemented, and preventative measures taken, to keep Halcyon’s past from bleeding into the present.
Now that would be damaging.
Nolan gave his lifejacket another tweak on the left side, then started the engine. It coughed twice and caught with a wet rumble. The blades chopped at the water, throwing up foam, and the ladies clucked again. Nolan applied a touch of throttle and eased away from the dock.
“Say goodbye to Halcyon, ladies.”
The ladies said goodbye and waved. Alyssa Prince waved back. Behind her, Halcyon loomed green and gray. Its tall trees brushed the sky.
On clear days, on those rare occasions when the lake was blue glass, Nolan could get the center console up to forty-three miles per hour. He once made the mainland—dock to dock—in eighteen minutes. It usually took somewhere around half an hour, depending on the weather. An ideal cruising speed was twenty-five miles per hour, which made for an enjoyable run, and was easier on the gas. Today he hovered a little south of this, watching the mainland inflate in front of him, occasionally turning to see Halcyon deflate behind. After ten minutes or so, he throttled all the way down, shut off the engine, and slipped the key into his pocket. The boat bobbed silently on the waves.
“Is everything okay?” Angela asked. She was shivering a little—it was chilly back there—but still smiling.
“Absolutely,” Nolan said, unfastening the clasps on his lifejacket. He then spread his arms and looked around, inhaling expansively. “The lake is incredibly deep here. About four hundred feet. Head a little farther west and it’s almost twice as deep again. A true marvel of nature.”
The ladies looked at one another, nodding appreciatively. Angela pointed at the sky, as if to say, Hey, you up there … outstanding work!
“I call this the point of no return,” Nolan said. He inhaled again, his nostrils as round as nickels. “Before we continue, I need to be absolutely certain you’ve made up your minds. There’s no going back from here.”
The ladies, shivering, nodded as one.
“No going back,” Angela echoed.
“Okay,” Nolan said, and shot Paula in the face.
He’d pulled the pistol from the holster secured to the left side of his ribcage, a Glock 19 with an Osprey 9 suppressor, which made concealment problematic, but was necessary; they were five miles from the nearest shoreline but sound carried on the lake. He’d aimed for Paula’s forehead, but the boat pitched as he pulled the trigger. The bullet smashed through her right cheekbone, tore through her skull, and exited at the back of her neck. She flopped. Her eyes were wide and rolling.
“Blurgh,” she said, and Nolan shot her again, this time in the throat. She didn’t say anything else.
Angela threw her hands into the air and leaped to her feet. “Goodness and blazes,” she shrieked. “Goodness and blazes. Goodness and—” She was splattered with her friend’s blood, her hair windswept, her feet tapping a crazy jig on the deck. It was only when Nolan leveled the gun at her that she stopped dancing and acknowledged her predicament.
“Blazes,” she said.
Nolan pulled the trigger and one shot was enough. A small hole flowered between her eyes and her head snapped backward. She staggered for a second, then dropped to the deck. The lake wind rippled her clothes and hair, but that was the only movement.
Doris—likewise shocked—bolted from her seat and scuttled past the cockpit to the front of the boat, as if she might continue off the bow and hot-step it across the water like Jesus Christ himself. “Oh, sweet momma,” she wailed, her hands trembling at the air. “Oh, Lord. Oh, mercy.”
Nolan squeezed off a shot and damn if the boat didn’t pitch again, sending the bullet skyward. He overbalanced and stumbled left. His foot came down in a puddle of blood and he hit the deck ass-first. The jolt caused his finger to jerk against the trigger and loose a shot. The bullet zinged past his face, warm as a kiss.
Too fucking close, he thought, staggering to his feet. He tipped right and almost went down again. Doris was on the other side of the cockpit, partially obscured from view. She’d run out of real estate, though—unless she wanted to go for a swim, of course. Nolan regained his balance and approached slowly, looking at her down the barrel of the gun.
Doris looked from the water to where her friends’ bodies were sprawled across the deck. Her hands were linked in prayer, but it wasn’t God she appealed to.
“Please, Nolan … please don’t do this.”
“You’re a good woman, Doris. I wanted you to stay on the island, dammit.” He aimed at her forehead. “This has to be done.”
“But why?”
“No one makes it back to the mainland. With the exception of a few faithful foot soldiers, everybody you’ve said goodbye to is at the bottom of this lake. Nicole Little, Joel Sutherland, Christine Figgy, or Foggy—whatever her fucking name was…” He used his free hand to gesture over the side of the boat. “The point of no return.”
“Garrett?” She looked at him with tear-filled eyes. Maybe she thought conversation was her only way out of this. It was a better option than swimming, but only just.
“He was one of our foot soldiers.” Nolan shrugged. The wind gusted. Heavy waves slapped against the hull. “If we let you return to the mainland, you’d find out what he did, and we can’t have that.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“We’ve done some extreme things in pursuit of Glam Moon. Which doesn’t make us all that different from Christianity, when you think about it. You people have been laying one another to waste since time out of mind.”
Doris hugged herself and shivered. The tears rolled down her face. Some people were ugly criers, but not Doris. She was beautiful.
“We need to cover our bases. We can’t have the mainland authorities finding out about us.” Nolan sniffed, the sights still fixed on Doris’s forehead. “And we can’t have you finding out about Garrett, Glenn, or any number of other Halcyon alumni. I’m sorry, Doris, but preventative measures have to be taken.”
“You’re crazy,” she said.
“It’s all for the Glam,” he said.
Doris took a trembling breath and looked at her fallen friends again. “They were good women. They were harmless.” She pointed at them, and Nolan, stupidly, followed the tip of her finger. At that moment, a wave slapped the bow and the boat seesawed again. Doris seized her opportunity. She lowered her shoulder, threw herself at Nolan, and connected full force with his soft middle. She was fifty-one years old, maybe one-fifteen on the scales. He was three y
ears younger and twice as heavy. Under any normal circumstance, she would have bounced off him like a ping-pong ball off a paddle. On a boat with a slippery deck—pitching this way and that—different physics applied; her diminutive mass, with all its forward momentum, was more than enough to knock him off balance. He stumbled backward with his arms flailing. If he’d been angled slightly to the right, he might have gone overboard. As it was, he tripped over one of the bait lockers and landed hard on his side. The Glock popped out of his hand, slid across the deck, and came to rest against Paula’s left foot.
Doris’s momentum was slowed by Nolan’s bulk, but not enough to keep her from falling. She landed on top of Nolan, rolled clumsily over him, and thumped her head on the deck.
“Oh,” she said.
“You fucking bitch,” Nolan said. He tried to get up but the boat swayed and he toppled backward, thumping the small of his back against the same locker he’d tripped over. He grimaced—shit, that hurt—but pushed the pain to one side. No time for pain, dammit—he had a situation to unfuck.
Doris, now, was on her knees and crawling toward the gun. Another wave pounded the hull and she fell into Angela, and for just a second it looked like the two ladies were snuggling to keep warm. Spooning for the Lord, Nolan thought, then Doris pushed herself up and clambered over her friend. The gun had skated midway down Paula’s shin, almost within reach. “Oh,” Doris said again, extending one hand …
“No you fucking don’t,” Nolan snapped. He lunged forward, grabbed one of Doris’s ankles, and yanked her toward him. She twisted and kicked, but ineffectually. The distance between her hand and the gun lengthened, although she managed to snag something else—Paula’s shoe. It was a slip-on, with a low, sensible heel hard enough to drive a nail into wood. Doris pulled it off Paula’s foot as she was dragged past, then whipped around and cracked the heel against Nolan’s jaw.
“Motherfuck.”
Nolan stumbled backward. Doris lashed out with the shoe again but this time he caught her wrist. He squeezed and twisted, snapping the bone like a dry stick. Doris screamed. The shoe fell from her hand. Nolan picked it up and smashed the heel into her face several times. Blood and broken teeth leaked from her mouth. Her legs twitched.
“Oh,” she said. “Ooooohhhh.”
Nolan crawled over Doris. He retrieved his gun, propped himself on one knee, and shot her in the head. The force of the bullet turned her face away and that was good. Blood spread around her and made patterns on the deck as the boat bobbed and swayed.
* * *
He replaced their lifejackets with three large backpacks that he’d stowed in the rod lockers before leaving the island, making triply sure the clasps at the belt and shoulders were secure. He then arranged the corpses—belly down—over the gunwale, so that their feet trailed in the water and their hands touched the deck. One at a time, he loaded the backpacks with hefty chunks of granite (this stowed in a different locker) until the bodies were sufficiently weighed down. Then he tipped them overboard. They bubbled and sank, never to be seen again.
Their luggage followed. The suitcases floated for a while, then took on water and disappeared beneath the surface. He mopped up the blood using lake water and bleach, and found three of the six bullets he’d fired. Two were lodged into the deck. The one that had passed through Paula Wetlow’s face was buried in the wooden lip of the transom, six feet behind where she’d been sitting. Nolan extracted them with a flathead screwdriver. The holes they left behind were shallow and didn’t look like bullet holes at all. Still, he went over them with a medium-grade sandpaper and they all but disappeared.
After scrubbing the blood off the lifejackets, including his own, he took care of himself. His jacket, pants, and shoes were also covered in blood. Not good, but something he’d prepared for. This wasn’t his first rodeo, after all. Over the years, he’d dropped seventy-six people into this lake and not all of them had gone quietly. He stripped to his underwear, washed himself from head to toe, then threw his clothes (along with Paula’s shoe) into a Hefty bag with a good-sized rock and tossed it overboard. He always kept a set of dry clothes on the boat, which was sensible in an environment where it was easy to get wet. He dressed in them now. They were creased and smelled like the lake, but they were clean and dry and that was the important thing.
Nolan started the engine and rumbled south to the mainland. Once docked, he gave the boat a more thorough inspection. The gun and suppressor were stowed away. There were no stray drops of blood. No bullet or skull fragments. It wouldn’t hold up to forensic scrutiny, but it didn’t have to.
He walked to his truck. The clock in the dash read 11:43. He’d told Martin Lovegrove that he’d meet him at the RTC at midday. He was running about thirty minutes late, but that wasn’t too bad, all things considered.
“Three out, three in,” Nolan said.
He climbed behind the wheel, gunned the ignition, and went to meet Halcyon’s newest family.
17
“No clocks, you say?” Jimmy made a show of looking at his expensive watch. It was 12:20 p.m. They’d made good time and arrived ten minutes early, which meant they’d been waiting in the RTC parking lot—granted, in Jimmy’s comfortable Lexus—for half an hour. It felt twice as long, though. No thanks to Jimmy looking at his watch every two minutes (as if there wasn’t a perfectly good clock in the dash), often tapping the face with one neatly clipped fingernail.
Shirley sighed in the backseat and said for at least the sixth time that she missed her phone, or Instagram, or some other bullshit that any person ten years older successfully grew up without. Edith tapped a drumbeat on the back of Martin’s headrest. It annoyed the royal fuck out of him, but she wasn’t in her garden, and she wasn’t complaining, so he didn’t say anything.
“You know,” Jimmy said smugly. “The good thing about clocks is that they help you get to places on time.”
“He’ll be here,” Martin said, but he sounded more confident than he felt. They were waiting for a man he’d had one face-to-face conversation with. There’d been a brief phone call since, in which Martin had presented his questions and concerns, and Nolan had answered, perhaps not in great detail, but adequately. He’d also mailed out a starter pack of sorts—four brochure-style photographs and a list of guidelines titled The Keys to Halcyon’s Success. The photos showed the layout of the cabins and the beautiful scenery. Martin shared them with the girls, who remained unimpressed.
The clock in the dash ticked to 12:25. Martin wondered how long they should wait before giving up and going home. It’d be tough—and unfair on the girls—to have to do this all again, though. If they went home now, they might just stay there.
On a similar wavelength, Jimmy said, “Perhaps it’s a sign, Mart. You know, like the universe is trying to stop you from going.”
“I’m with the universe,” Shirley chimed in.
“He’s twenty-five minutes late,” Martin said. “Not three hours. Let’s just chill.”
“I vote we chill until twelve thirty,” Shirley said. “Then go home.”
“He’ll be here.”
And he was. Martin watched the clock tick over to 12:28, then looked up to see a white pickup truck roll into the RTC parking lot. Nolan was behind the wheel, his head scrolling from side to side, looking for Martin and the girls.
“Here we go.” Martin opened the door and waved—got Nolan’s attention. Nolan swung the truck around and parked two spaces to the left of Jimmy’s Lexus.
“Your chariot awaits,” Jimmy said.
Martin clapped his brother on the shoulder. “Take care, Jimmy. I’ll see you soon.”
“Hope so.” Jimmy turned to the backseat. “Adios, girls. And remember, don’t drink the Kool-Aid.” He clasped Martin’s arm before he could leave. All the smugness had gone from his tone and his eyes were serious. “I hope you find some peace, brother. And if it all begins to feel a little weird, get the hell out of there.”
“Sure, Jimmy.”
“I
’m not kidding, man. There’s a saying: Better the devil you know—”
“I got it.”
Martin pulled their luggage—including Edith’s cumbersome guitar case—from the Lexus’s trunk as Nolan introduced himself to the girls. He was all smiles and bouncy handshakes. “You’re going to love Halcyon,” he promised. “Everyone’s so excited to meet you.” They climbed into the pickup and rumbled away, taking the 481 north out of Syracuse. Nolan apologized for being late but didn’t give a reason why. Martin looked at the girls and smiled reassuringly. He was full of nervous excitement. Nolan sensed it—told him to relax.
“It’ll be wonderful,” he said. “I promise.”
They drove forty-five minutes to the town of Fisherman’s Point, perched—small and picturesque—on the edge of Lake Ontario. “So it is on an island,” Martin said, and Nolan said nothing, only winked. They veered west and then north onto an unpaved road that cut between thick trees and arrived at a dilapidated summerhouse, crumbling into the earth and surrounding foliage. There was a boathouse beyond, its pale siding catching the steely light. Nolan parked in an overgrown driveway and shut off the truck.
“This isn’t it,” Shirley said, alarmed. “Tell me this isn’t it.”
Nolan chuckled and popped open the driver’s door. “Heck, no,” he said. “We’re heading out there.”
He pointed across the water. They saw nothing.
They carried their luggage to the boathouse, where the center console bobbed cheerfully in the slip. Now the girls brightened for the first time all day, both of them smiling. Nolan helped them aboard and they giggled as the boat rolled first one way, then the other.
“Safety first, ladies,” Nolan said, handing them lifejackets.
“Ew, they’re all wet,” Edith said.
Martin remained on the dock to hand Nolan the luggage, but paused before stepping aboard. He felt, then, the first pangs of uncertainty. He’d considered that Halcyon might be on an island, but never that it was so far off the mainland. They couldn’t exactly walk away whenever they wanted to.