I closed my eyes and waited for sleep. When my cell phone buzzed in my sweatshirt pocket ten minutes later, I was staring at the ceiling and happy to have something to do.
Are you awake?—S
Of course, I wrote back.
Are you OK?
He’d asked this earlier, but I hadn’t had a chance to give him a real answer. Caleb was there when Simon lifted me out of the water, and Captain Monty, Riley, Paige, and other party guests were watching and listening from a nearby fishing boat that Captain Monty had managed to navigate toward us through slush and ice.
A little rattled, but otherwise fine. I paused, my thumbs hovering over the keypad, before adding, I miss you, though.
I’d barely hit Send when another text popped up.
Do you want me to come over?
I stared at the screen. There was nothing I wanted more than to see him; before my impromptu dip this afternoon, the plan had been for Paige to spend the night with Grandma Betty while I went to the lake house, where Simon would meet me after his parents had gone to bed. But then Grandma Betty had insisted I stay with them, and I’d been too scared to argue.
It’s late, I typed. How about an early breakfast?
Harbor Homefries, 8 a.m.?
I agreed to the meeting, then closed the phone and looked at Paige. I couldn’t see her under the blanket, but the white mound rose and fell every few seconds. Satisfied she was out, I pushed aside my own comforter, got up, and started across the living room.
Paige hadn’t wanted to sleep in her room—or anywhere on the second floor—and I didn’t blame her. Back home, I’d offered to stay in Justine’s room so Paige could have mine, and as weird as it sometimes was, and as much as it could feel like I hadn’t known Justine at all, I did know one thing: she wasn’t a murderer. Paige’s situation was obviously very different, and I understood her wanting to keep her distance.
But that didn’t mean I had to.
The only light came from the fireplace and faded as I climbed the stairs. When I reached the top step, it was so dark I couldn’t see my hand on the banister. I felt along the wall for a switch, but there wasn’t any.
This was normally the point at which, if I’d even made it this far, I’d bolt back down the stairs. But surprisingly, I felt okay. Calm. Strong. The feeling had started as soon as I hit the water and intensified quickly. I was submerged less than a minute, but by the time I was back on solid ground and my body had had a chance to absorb the natural salt, I felt better physically than I had since jumping off Chione Cliffs.
I’d taken only two steps down the hall when I heard a familiar voice.
“Can’t sleep, Vanessa?”
I froze, then turned slowly to see Betty standing in the open doorway of her bedroom.
“You thought it was your boat, didn’t you?” she asked.
I stepped toward her. “I know it was my boat.”
“But they’re dead.”
Our eyes locked. Hers were usually aimed up, but now they found and seemed to hold mine in place. In the dim lighting, their gray clouds appeared to shift and move, just like the ones in the sky. “How do you know?” I asked.
She stepped aside and waited. As I entered the room, I breathed in the salty ocean air blowing through the open windows. I hadn’t been in Betty’s room since the morning of the Northern Lights Festival last summer, and it looked different. The walls, which had been filled with needlepoint images of Chione Cliffs, were bare. The fireplace was dark. The carpet had been replaced with dark hardwood floors. Besides Betty her-self, the only thing that indicated the room belonged to her was the purple swimsuit hanging from a hook on the bathroom door.
And an older, tired-looking man, sitting in a rocking chair by the windows.
“Hi, Oliver,” I said.
He looked up from the open notebook in his lap. I wondered if he was working on another volume of The Complete History of Winter Harbor. He’d written several over the past thirty years—mostly, he claimed, to distract Betty from her own fears with
stories of the adopted home she loved.
“Vanessa,” he said, and returned his gaze to the notebook.
That was odd. When I’d first met Oliver, he’d been cool, even cranky. But he’d slowly warmed up as he had helped us figure out what was going on in Winter Harbor, and couldn’t have been nicer after he and Betty had reunited following a years-long separation. This greeting, unaccompanied by a “hello” or a smile, was one the old Oliver would’ve given.
Before I could ask if I was interrupting, Betty sat in a velvet armchair by the fireplace and continued speaking.
“I’d hear them,” she said. “Their voices fell silent the second the water froze, and they never spoke again.”
Not wanting to bother Oliver, who was now writing, I stepped toward her and lowered my voice. “But it was my boat. Mine and Justine’s. It was worn in the same places, and one oar had—”
“Red anchor stickers.” Betty tilted her head. “Just like the kind the Winter Harbor pharmacy sells at the register, the kind every child begs her parents to buy. If you look closely, you’ll find them all over town—on garbage cans, newspaper bins, street signs.”
I frowned. Now that she mentioned it, I could picture them. And the pharmacy was where Justine had bought hers the day she decided to decorate the oars.
“If Raina and Zara were alive,” Betty continued, “and if they were planning some kind of revenge, I would know.”
“But they’d try to keep it from you, wouldn’t they? They’d know you could hear their thoughts and be careful to control what they think.”
“I’d still hear their efforts to focus on other things. All sirens are connected, so it’s possible to hear a stranger’s thoughts if you try hard enough, though it isn’t easy. But you can always hear family. Even if you don’t want to.”
I looked away, like she could actually see the doubt on my face. My eyes fell on the bed on the other side of the room; it, too, looked different, covered in one thin sheet instead of layers of blankets, as if Betty hadn’t slept in it since the day I’d found her lying there, her dried skin flaking, so thirsty she couldn’t speak.
“She was kind.”
I looked at Betty. She motioned for me to sit in the chair across from hers.
“Your mother, Charlotte Bleu, owned a small bookstore on the outskirts of town. She’d let people read there for hours, never caring whether they finished books without buying them. She carried an impressive collection, too—lots of rare and first editions that she could’ve sold for a great deal of money, but that she gave away if a customer was interested and couldn’t pay the asking price.”
It took a second to find the words for my next questions. “Is that where she met my dad? At her bookstore?”
Betty paused. “I don’t know.”
“Did you see them together? Did they ever come to the restaurant?”
“No. But as far as I understand, they weren’t together long.”
Now that we were actually talking about her, the questions came faster than I could ask them. “Did Raina say anything else? She obviously knew about them, since she had their picture. Did she take that picture? If not, whoever did must know more about—”
“Vanessa, I’m afraid I’ve told you all I know. If Raina knew more, well…”
I sat back. If Raina knew more, we’d never find out.
We were silent for a long moment. The only sounds were the light flapping of fabric as the curtains lifted in the breeze, and the rustling of paper as Oliver turned pages. I had countless questions about Charlotte, Dad, the first year of my life, the inconsistent effects of my abilities. But there was one question I needed to ask above all the others. One that, at this point, only Betty could answer.
I glanced at Oliver. He was engrossed in his work and didn’t seem to be paying attention to us, but I leaned closer to Betty and lowered my voice to a whisper anyway.
“I drink salt water,” I said. “Constant
ly. I take two saltwater baths every day. That helps, but I still get so thirsty and hot. And now I’m having these terrible headaches that won’t go away no matter how much aspirin I take.”
I paused, giving her a chance to tell me what I needed to know without my having to ask. But she didn’t. Her face, like her eyes, remained blank.
“Betty,” I continued, my voice trembling, “how do you do this? How do I do this?”
There was a loud, single knock behind us. I jumped. Betty didn’t.
“It’s late,” Oliver said, suddenly next to us. The rocking chair, which had apparently hit the wall when he stood, moved forward and back, forward and back, like it was still occupied. “We should all get some sleep.”
His head was turned toward me, but his eyes aimed over my shoulder.
“Paige is waking,” Betty added coolly. “She’ll worry if you’re not there.”
Torn between wanting to try to learn more and getting out of there as fast as possible, I finally stood and walked across the room. At the door I turned to say something—to thank Betty, to assure her that Paige was doing well, or to offer something else that kept this brief visit from ending awkwardly—but then I saw her standing perfectly still before the open window, the wind whipping her long gray hair around her head. Like she was listening intently to something only she could hear.
“Goodnight, Vanessa,” Oliver said evenly.
I stepped into the hallway and closed the door as fast as I could without slamming it. I had one hand on the stairwell banister and was about to start down when it occurred to me that I shouldn’t be able to see the banister. The hallway was brighter than it had been when I came upstairs, and the new source of light seemed to be coming from behind me.
It’s a lamp… or a candle, I told myself. You just didn’t notice it before….
But it wasn’t a lamp or a candle. It was a glowing, silver stream rippling across the floor at the other end of the hall.
I glanced toward Betty’s room; her door was still closed. I listened for Paige, but she was silent. So was the rest of the house—even the wind seemed to have stopped. All I could hear as I headed slowly down the hallway was the ancient floorboards creaking beneath my feet.
Reaching Zara’s old bedroom, I stopped and looked down. The cool, silver light streamed out from under the door and washed over my bare feet like water on the beach. The last time I’d stood in this spot, Justine had encouraged me to go inside. I waited for similar encouragement now, but it didn’t come.
I grabbed the glowing doorknob—and yanked my hand back when the brass scalded my palm. It felt like I’d just touched an open flame, but the knob wasn’t hot. It was ice cold. It burned a shimmery blue and seemed to pulsate in time to my pounding heart.
Closing my eyes, I pictured the inside of the room as I’d last seen it. White furniture. Crystal perfume bottles. A million bursts of light reflected in floor-to-ceiling mirrors.
I took the knob, twisted, shoved the door.
The silver light went out.
I fumbled for the cell phone in my sweatshirt pocket and flipped it open. I aimed it inside the room, but the dim beam was swallowed by blackness.
I glanced down the empty hallway. The crack beneath Betty’s door, lit just seconds ago, was also dark.
I exhaled. The power must’ve gone out. Lamps had been turned on in Zara’s room, and my overactive nerves had simply transformed their normal light into something else. Which was completely understandable, considering everything I’d learned in the Marchands’ house—and that this was my first time back since the day Winter Harbor froze.
Just to be sure, I moved farther into the room. The air grew thicker, heavier. It smelled stale, like the door and windows hadn’t been opened in months. The darkness brightened slightly when I neared the wall of windows, thanks to a high full moon. Reaching the first window, I looked out at the ocean crashing onto the shore a hundred feet below, then turned and peered around the room.
My eyes had adjusted enough to see several feet in front of me, and I didn’t know whether to be reassured or disappointed when I saw that the room was empty. There was no furniture, no dresser for crystal perfume bottles to line. The mirrors had been removed from the walls, exposing peeling wallpaper. And just as it had in Betty’s room, the carpet had been ripped up, revealing dull wooden planks.
If she’d somehow come back to life, this wasn’t where Zara was hiding.
“Sleep,” I said quietly, starting back across the room. “You need it. Now.”
My eyes were fixed on the door as I walked, so I didn’t see the lamp in the middle of the room until my right leg knocked into it and sent it clattering to the floor. The sudden noise shattered the silence, and I lunged for the lamp to keep it from rolling and waking Paige downstairs. My fingers grabbed the base, and I gently turned it upright and placed it on the floor.
My entire body ached to run back downstairs, but I stayed put long enough to tug on the lamp’s thin, short chain.
The bulb glowed white. In its illuminated circle I could see a cord that ran from the lamp base and plugged into an outlet on the nearest wall.
And lying on the floor nearby, a rowboat oar, its trail of shiny red anchors glittering like garnets in the bright light.
CHAPTER 11
“IT’S RAINING RATS and spiders.”
I stared at the windshield. The wipers fired back and forth, but the water streamed down the glass like they were still.
“Rats and spiders?” Paige repeated.
Dad smiled at her in the rearview mirror. “Way back when, Vanessa didn’t like the idea of cute cats and dogs falling from the sky. She was, however, indifferent to rodents and creepy bugs. We’ve been using the phrase to describe heavy rain since.” He paused. “Isn’t that right?”
I could tell he wanted me to share the story of how we had eventually decided on rats and spiders—which included a lengthy family process of elimination involving charts and lists that had taken place over two nights and lots of Chinese food—but I wasn’t in the mood. I was tired, achy, and still trying to make sense of everything that had happened over the weekend.
“Yes,” I said instead.
“Well,” Paige said, “it’s definitely an accurate description of what’s going on out there. Thanks again for the ride, Mr. Sands.”
“Thank you for taking the scenic route with me while I dropped off books to a colleague. And if the weather’s still this bad after school, just call and let me know. I—”
He slammed on the brake. I jerked forward, hard enough to make the seat belt lock and tug me back.
“Dad, what—”
The car swerved to the left, interrupting me. It swung back to the right, and then left again. As Dad spun the steering wheel, fighting to regain control on the slick road, I dug my feet into the floor and grabbed the ceiling handle. In the backseat, Paige squealed; I glanced in the side-view mirror just as she covered her face with both hands.
A second later, the front left tire hit a curb. The car rocked, then stopped.
“Oh no,” Paige breathed.
My fingers shook as I tried to unbuckle the seat belt. The latch gave on the third try, and I twisted in the passenger seat to look in the back. “Are you okay?”
She, too, was looking back, through the rear window.
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