by Steven James
“It’s not that common of a name. It would make sense.”
Daniel was calculating dates, times, ages. “If Betty was related to Jarvis, then if I’m right about how all this works out, my grandma would have either been cousins with Betty, or maybe even her sister. Does the ledger say anything about the girl?”
“No.”
“Jarvis Delacroix wrote that he found a rope that was long enough,” Nicole said, “that those who take their own lives deserve to go to hell.”
No one spoke. It was almost as if they were afraid that their words might have condemned Jarvis to the sentence he’d expected to suffer.
“If he hanged himself,” she asked at last, “don’t you think there’d be a record of it somewhere, something about this online? We should be able to find out what happened.”
“I don’t know,” Mia said. “Something might have appeared in a newspaper article at the time, but who’s to say that anyone ever went back and posted it on the web? If it was from some small regional paper from Bayfield or something, I’d say it’s not very likely that anyone would have bothered uploading it to the Internet.”
Nicole pulled out her phone. “It’s worth a look.”
As Daniel was about to get started searching online, he noticed a few texts and checked to see if any were from his dad, but it was only a couple of friends checking in.
Distracted by everything that was going on, he quickly typed in responses, then set his phone on the bed next to him and returned his attention to his laptop, but a moment later his phone vibrated and Nicole said, “You have a text.” Before he could reach for it, she picked it up to hand it to him and noticed the screen.
A strange look crossed her face.
“What is it?”
“Who’s Madeline?”
“What?”
She turned the phone’s screen toward him. “She’s asking you to come by tomorrow. She wants to know when you’re going to be there.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
“Honestly, Nicole, I don’t know who she is.”
She didn’t reply.
“I’m serious.”
“Then why would she text that she wants to see you and ask when you’re going to meet her?”
“I wasn’t. I mean, I’m not going to.”
“Well, she seems to think you are.”
“I’ve been getting messages from her, but I don’t even know who’s sending them.”
“Neither one of us does,” Kyle cut in, trying to help.
Nicole looked from Kyle to Daniel and then back at Kyle. “So you knew about her too?”
“Nicole, calm down,” Daniel said. “Let me—”
“I am calm. I’m calm. I just want to know what’s going on. So you’ve been getting these texts from this girl: Where are they? I only see this one.”
“They’re archived.” He showed her how to access them.
On the one hand, Daniel could understand why Nicole would be upset, but he just wanted her to give him a chance to explain. “For the last couple days I’ve been getting these weird texts from her—or him, whoever it is. No number comes up on my phone so I can’t even reply to figure out who’s sending the messages. I’m telling you the truth; I don’t know who it—”
“So,” she read the texts aloud, “‘You need to come visit me. I have a surprise for you.’ Okay, that’s interesting. ‘Be careful who you tell your secrets to.’ Oh, and then there’s this one: ‘I’m here waiting for you, Daniel.’ Huh. ‘Check the basement—M.’ Really? She was at your house?”
“No.”
“But she left you something down there?”
“No. Nothing like that. That’s where I found the maps. That’s all.”
Nicole was in the middle of scrolling through his phone’s home screens when she suddenly paused.
“What is it?”
She didn’t respond.
“Nicole?”
“Your recent downloads. So I was just seeing if there are any other chat or messaging apps . . . and . . .”
“And what?”
“And you have an app on here that lets you send anonymous texts.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s in your recent downloads. You downloaded it Wednesday afternoon.”
That’s right before you got the first text from Madeline.
“Are you saying the texts were sent from my phone?”
“I’m saying they could’ve been.” She handed him the phone.
He stared disbelievingly at the screen, trying his best to remember either downloading the app or sending the messages, but couldn’t recall doing either.
You’re the one who’s been sending the texts.
No.
Yes.
Then why don’t you remember it?
There’s a lot you’re not remembering lately, Daniel.
“Did you send them?” Nicole asked.
“I honestly don’t know. I don’t even know who Madeline is or—”
“Hang on.” Kyle was busy at his phone. “We were looking at lighthouses in the Apostle Islands, right? So there are twenty-one islands in the National Lakeshore, but there’s one other island out there that’s not part of the park. I saw it earlier when I was doing research, but I didn’t make the . . .”
He tapped at the screen, then nodded. “Three guesses what its name is, and the first two don’t count.”
“Oh,” Daniel said, “don’t tell me it’s Madeline.”
“Look at that, first try: Madeline Island.”
“And does it have a lighthouse?”
“It sure does.” Kyle tilted his phone so everyone else could see the page he’d pulled up. “The Lost Cove Lighthouse.”
“That’s it, then. Let’s see if there’s any mention of a lighthouse keeper there committing suicide.”
Sweeping his flashlight beam back and forth, Sheriff Byers scrutinized the dark forest.
He’d been able to follow his son’s and Nicole’s boot prints most of the way, but the wind was steadily erasing them and it was getting harder and harder to discern where their trail went.
He didn’t see any sign of the wolf that Daniel had told him about.
The black wilderness lurked just on the boundary of the spear of light from his flashlight.
The sheriff decided to give it a few more minutes and then call it a night.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
Now that they were able to pinpoint their search to a specific time and place, it didn’t take long for the four friends to find what they were looking for.
Kyle let out a slow breath.
“What is it?” Daniel asked.
“There was a newspaper back then, the Northwoods Review. There’s a story about a shipwreck on July seventeenth that year. Twelve people died.”
“Twelve people?” Nicole swallowed hard as she said the words.
“Yeah. The light had gone out. They hit the shoal in a storm.” Kyle consulted the article he’d pulled up on his phone. “When the survivors went to the lighthouse later they found the keeper dead in the tower. Hanged himself. It was Jarvis Delacroix. They list his name.”
“Send me the link,” Daniel said.
He clicked to the site as his friend went on: “It looks like they couldn’t confirm whether Jarvis killed himself before the shipwreck or after it. But the survivors said there was no light during that storm.”
“So,” Nicole muttered, thinking aloud, “either he gave in to that temptation to put out the light and then killed himself, or he committed suicide first because of his guilt about Betty’s death and then he wasn’t there to keep it lit during that storm.”
“Does the article mention her at all?” asked Mia.
Kyle checked, then shook his head. “No. Nothing about anyone named Betty.”
“But don’t you think that’s kind of weird, though? I mean, that next day—July eighteenth—was the day her mom was supposed to return to
pick her up. Is it really possible that no one else connected Betty’s disappearance with the suicide or the shipwreck?”
“I don’t know. I guess it’s possible. I mean, if there was that big of a tragedy—twelve people dying in a shipwreck—a missing girl might not really make it into the news.”
“Or,” Daniel suggested, “there might be another explanation.”
“What’s that?”
“That she never existed at all.”
“Huh?”
“Maybe Jarvis had blurs too. Just like I do.”
“But he mentioned her in his journal. And what about that photo of her?”
“Just because he mentioned her doesn’t mean she was real. And we don’t know who that’s a picture of, just that it’s the same girl I saw in my blur. If I saw the stuff in that box when I was a kid, maybe I somehow remembered it. Jarvis might have seen that photo too. We know he was lonely on that island. What if he made up someone visiting him to keep himself company?”
He turned to Mia. “Like you said earlier, lighthouse keepers sometimes go mad. Maybe that’s what happened with him.”
No one seemed to know what to say.
“But why now?” Kyle asked. “Why would you be remembering all this now?”
“That’s what we need to figure out. Someone kept these diaries and hid them in that barn. The place is old, but I’m not sure it would have been there back in the 1930s, so that means someone stuck that box in the barn sometime later. But right now I’m wondering something else.”
“What’s that?”
“In my blur, the girl was crying tears of blood. Why? There’s nothing in the diary to indicate that Betty—whether she was real or not—would have had bleeding eyes when she died.”
“I’m not sure how literally you need to take everything from your blurs,” Mia said. “I mean, even when Emily appeared to you a couple months ago, it wasn’t like everything that happened in your blur was identical to what happened in real life.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Betty saw something horrible? The blood is metaphorical?”
Or maybe you did.
Maybe you saw something horrible.
There in the barn. Something to do with the loft, with the—
“If Jarvis really was from your mom’s side of the family,” Kyle interrupted his thoughts, “wouldn’t she have told you about this?”
“It’s not exactly the kind of thing you’d want to be sharing with your family members.”
“Maybe she didn’t know about him,” Nicole offered.
“There’s one way to find out.”
“What’s that?”
Daniel already had his phone out. “Ask her.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
His mom was still up in Anchorage, Alaska, and he wasn’t certain what time zone that was in, but he put the call through anyhow.
While he waited for her to pick up, he wondered how much he should tell her about everything that was going on.
Back in the fall when the blurs started, his dad hadn’t felt like it was right to keep any of that from her and, honestly, Daniel had found himself agreeing. So even though he wasn’t too excited about it, they’d filled her in and she knew about the blurs.
Naturally, she’d been worried about him and had emphasized that she wanted him to see a psychiatrist to talk things through.
However, once stuff was out in the open, neither she nor Daniel really brought up anything related to the blurs. Instead, they mostly talked about surface topics—what they’d been doing, Daniel’s grades, if his team had won, things like that.
In a way, he wished they would talk more about stuff that really mattered, but on the other hand he was happy they didn’t go there.
After all, once you start down that path with people, get to the emotional level, you end up in a place where you can get hurt.
There’s really no in-between: either you can be close to someone and vulnerable, or distant and safe.
Sort of a catch-22.
The phone rang.
No answer.
Right when he thought it was about to go to voicemail, she answered and must have had caller ID because she spoke first. “Daniel?” It was clear by the way she said his name that she was surprised he was calling. “Is everything okay?”
The question itself said a lot about their relationship: when he called, she immediately assumed something was wrong.
“I’m fine.”
“Oh. Well, okay. Good.”
He felt a little stuck. How do you really get into the topic of talking about a relative who was responsible for the death of twelve people—fourteen, if you counted himself and the girl?
If Betty was even real.
You should have thought this through a little more.
His friends slipped away so he could speak to his mom in private.
“Dad said you’re coming back for Christmas?” he said to her.
“I was planning to, but there’s a big storm system moving in up here. If we get as much snow and ice as they’re predicting, I might not make it back until after the holiday. But we’ll just celebrate it then.”
“Sure,” he said. “That makes sense.” But he was thinking, And when were you going to tell us that?
“How did it go last night?” she asked.
“Last night?”
“The game.”
“Oh. We won.”
“How’d you play?”
“Alright. I mean, I played okay.”
“Well, then. That’s good.”
Silence stretched across the line.
“You’re sure you’re fine?” she asked.
Just ask her.
“Did your mom have any sisters?”
“What?”
“Did she have any sisters that you maybe just never told me about?”
“No.”
“So, no one named Betty?”
“No.” She almost made it sound like a question and Daniel could tell her curiosity was definitely piqued.
“Mom, what do you know about Jarvis Delacroix?”
“Jarvis Delacroix?”
“He was a lighthouse keeper back in the 1930s. Since Delacroix was your mom’s maiden name I wondered if maybe they were related.”
“Yes, they were.” Her tone was impossible to read. “What is all this in regards to?”
“What do you know about him?”
“There was a Jarvis who was my grandfather’s brother, but no one really talked about him much.”
That’s gotta be him.
So if Jarvis was Grandma’s uncle, that means Betty would have been her cousin.
“And Betty?” he said.
“I don’t know about any Bettys. Why do you ask? What’s going on?”
“My friends and I came across Jarvis’s diary.”
“Where?”
“At a barn that’s near where Grandma used to live.”
“That farm out on County N?”
“Yeah. That’s right. I used to go there sometimes.”
“Yes.”
“You knew?”
“I followed you one day but your grandmother assured us the neighbor wouldn’t mind. So I let you play there. I know it was sometimes hard being in the house with her.”
“Did something happen there at the barn?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know, just—anything weird?”
“Not that I know of. One day you just stopped going out on walks when we visited. You were hesitant even to go to her house. But I don’t know why Jarvis’s diary would have been there. A minute ago you were asking about Betty. Who’s Betty?”
“Someone who’s brought up in the diary,” he said, somewhat vaguely.
“Why are you interested in all this?”
“Something’s going on. My blurs. They started again.”
“Oh, Daniel.” It was amazing how much emotion she packed into t
hose two words. “Have you told your father?”
“Not yet.”
“What are the blurs of?”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“You must feel lonely.”
That seemed like a curious thing to say, especially since she was the one who’d left him and his dad alone in the first place.
He switched gears, followed up on the loneliness deal. “Mom, why did you leave?”
He’d asked her this before and, honestly, he expected to get the same response he always got: that this wasn’t the time to talk about it, that they would discuss it later.
Always later.
But tonight, to his surprise, she actually gave him an answer. “I wanted to protect you and your father.”
“Protect us? From what?”
“I never told you how your grandmother died.”
“Sure you did. She had a reaction to some pills she was taking.”
“That was the best way to put it for you when you were younger. I just never corrected things. I guess it was easier to let that explanation stand.”
“You lied to me?”
“No, I just didn’t get into all of the details.”
“So what happened? How did she die?”
A pause. “She took her own life, Daniel.”
“What?”
“Pills. She overdosed on pills.”
“How do you know it wasn’t an accident?”
“She left a note.”
Daniel tried to take all this in. “What did it say?”
“Daniel, I’m not sure we need to—”
“Mom, what did it say?”
“She wrote that she couldn’t stand seeing them anymore.”
“Seeing who?”
“We were never sure. She never told us.”
“So she was seeing things, is that it?”
“We don’t know that.”
“But she could have been, I mean . . .”
“Like I said, we just don’t know.”
“So why didn’t you—Wait a minute. It wasn’t just Grandma, was it?”
“What do you mean?”
“You said you left to protect me and Dad, but you didn’t say what you wanted to protect us from. It was you, wasn’t it? You’ve been seeing things? Or maybe hearing voices? Which is it?”
“This really isn’t the best time to get into all this. It’d be better if we discussed this when I get back to—”