Not only was their chance at contacting civilization gone but she’d managed to piss off the love of her life. Again. Awesome, Meg. Well done. Why don’t you just throw yourself off the side of the island right now and …
As she thought the words her eyes drifted off the walkway down the rocky hill. But instead of the jagged rocks and washed up driftwood she expected to find, she saw something else. A splash of neon yellow. An inflatable raft maybe? What would that be doing way out here? Meg squinted into the rain, blinking her eyes to try and get a better look. The shape, the size. Too small for a raft. It looked almost like …
Oh God.
“T.J.!” Meg yelled. She wasn’t sure if he could hear her. She called out again, her eyes still fixed on the rocks. “T.J., come he—”
“What’s wrong?” He was at her shoulder in an instant, but before Meg could even verbalize what she was staring at, he’d followed her gaze and seen it with his own eyes.
“Holy shit,” T.J. said. He vaulted over the handrail and started to pick his way down the side of the hill.
Meg didn’t hesitate. She shimmied under the rail and followed straight behind him. Her clunky rain boots made the climbing slow, and T.J. easily outpaced her as he half climbed, half slid down the muddy hillside. He was at the bottom a full minute before Meg made it down. When she stumbled up behind him, T.J. spun around and grabbed her.
“Don’t look,” he said, placing himself between her and whatever lay on the rocks.
“What?” she said. “What is it?”
T.J.’s face was pinched. Instead of answering he pulled her to him and hugged her so fiercely she could barely breathe. She could feel his hands shake as he slowly peeled himself away from her.
“There’s been an accident.”
“Is it Minnie?” Meg could barely control the panic in her voice.
T.J. shook his head.
She let out a breath. If Minnie had been injured trying to follow them down to the boathouse Meg would never have forgiven herself.
“Maybe you should go up to the house,” T.J. said.
“Let me see. I want to see what happened.” Meg sounded far braver than she felt, but somehow, in the midst of all the strange events of the last twenty-four hours, she needed to see.
T.J. didn’t protest. He merely stepped aside.
Behind him, lying on her back, was Vivian. Her eyes were wide open, frozen in fear and pain. She wore a yellow raincoat buttoned up over her sweater and silk pajamas. Blood trailed slowly down her arm, dripping off her fingers into the pooling water beneath her. A jagged piece of driftwood protruded from her chest; it had impaled her from behind.
“Is she …” Meg’s throat closed up.
“Yeah.”
“Oh my God.”
“Yeah.”
Meg had no idea what to think. Vivian must have followed them down to the boathouse. But how did this happen?
“She must have slipped on the walkway,” T.J. said, answering Meg’s unasked question. “If she came down behind us in that rain … I mean, it was pretty dangerous.”
Vivian’s eyes stared blank and unseeing at the rocky hillside Meg and T.J. had just traversed. Her head lolled off the edge of the log, her arms splayed out on either side of her body. Meg pictured Vivian hurrying after them, convinced they wouldn’t be able to find or operate a radio without her assistance. She was rushing and slipped on the wet walkways. She toppled head-over-heels down the hill and landed right on the jagged log, which literally stabbed her through the back. Her micromanaging was her undoing.
What were the odds? Two deaths in just a few hours? Meg shook off her fears. Lori’s was obviously a suicide, Vivian’s a horrific accident. Right?
The rain increased as Meg and T.J. stood beside Vivian’s body. Large drops hit her open eyes and caused the eyelids to flutter slightly, as if Vivian was trying to wink at them. Meg forced herself to look away before she was sick.
“What should we do?” she asked.
“There’s that tarp in the boathouse,” he said. “I’ll get it. We should cover the body but maybe not move her until …” His voice trailed off.
“Until Jessica comes?” Meg said. She couldn’t hide the sarcasm in her voice. “Or until the ferry comes back tomorrow? That seems a better chance at this point.”
T.J. looked down at her. His lips were pressed together so tightly they’d turned pink. “I’ll get the tarp,” he said, refusing to reply to her sarcasm. “You go back up to the house and tell them what happened.”
Meg and T.J. scrambled up the side of the hill. The rain made the ascent in waterlogged flannel pajamas and clunky rubber galoshes even more precarious, but by almost pure force of will, they managed to haul themselves back up on the nearest walkway. They sat panting for a moment—wet, muddy, mentally and physically exhausted. Meg couldn’t stop looking down at Vivian’s body. Just like Lori, her eyes were still open, empty and soulless. Meg couldn’t get either death mask out of her mind.
Without a word, T.J. stood up and lifted Meg to her feet. He gave her a short nod, then carefully made his way back down to the boathouse. Meg watched him go for a few moments before she reluctantly turned her eyes to White Rock House, just visible through the trees. She was going to have to tell a house full of already weirded-out people that there’d been another accident. Minnie … oh God, Minnie was going to completely freak. And without her meds.
Meg was just approaching the sharp turn in the walkway when she stopped dead. At exactly the point where she’d lost her footing and almost fallen down the hill, the railing was gone, broken clean away.
A lump rose in Meg’s throat. This must be the spot where Vivian had slipped, just as Meg had an hour earlier. And if T.J. hadn’t been there to catch her, it could easily have been her own body down there on the beach impaled on a log.
Meg didn’t want to think about it. She turned away and hurried up to the house, desperate to be inside. The storm picked up strength as Meg emerged from the trees. Never before had wind and rain felt so ominous, like it was mimicking the cold misery Meg felt inside. Vivian and Lori were dead. There was no radio in the boat. They were quickly running out of options.
To make matters worse, the back door to the patio was locked. Dammit. Vivian must have locked it when she left the house. God, this day just kept getting better and better. With her mood sinking faster than the Titanic, she made her way to the front of the house.
Meg took a deep breath. She could do this. There were eight of them at White Rock House. Strength in numbers. They’d just hunker down and get through the night. Monday morning the ferry would be back and this whole nightmarish weekend would be just a memory.
Okay. She had to be strong. Meg turned the handle and marched into the house.
But all her bravado, all her false courage and confidence died the second she stepped into the foyer.
On the wall, next to the first, was a freshly painted red slash.
EIGHTEEN
MEG WASN’T SURE HOW LONG SHE STOOD IN THE foyer dripping muddy puddles on the floor. She hardly remembered why she was there. All she could focus on were the parallel slash marks on the wall. Two slashes. Two dead bodies. There was no way in hell it was a coincidence.
But what did it mean? Someone was messing with them, obviously. Trying to scare them. Freaking sick sense of humor. Probably just a practical joke that happened to come at the same time as Vivian’s accident. Or …
Meg’s stomach dropped. Or someone else knew that Vivian was dead.
“You okay?”
Meg snapped back to the present and found Nathan standing in the hall with a half-eaten turkey sandwich in his hand.
“Did you guys find a radio? Where’s T.J.? Do you want some of this sandwich? It’s pretty go—” Nathan stopped midword as his eyes found what Meg had already discovered.
“What is that?” he roared. His sandwich fell to the ground as he stormed across the foyer to the slash marks. “What the fuck did you do?”
He swung around and got up in Meg’s face. “There was only one mark before, now there are two. Do you think this is funny or something? Trying to make them look like that stupid video we watched?”
Meg pulled away from him. “I didn’t do it.”
“Dudes!” Nathan crossed into the hallway and yelled again. “Everybody downstairs. Now!”
Kumiko and Gunner came first, then Kenny, all from the living room. Ben and Minnie leisurely strolled down the stairs.
“Why is everyone screaming?” Minnie said through a yawn.
“It’s her,” Nathan said, pointing a finger at Meg. “She did it.”
“Did what?” Kumiko asked.
Nathan nodded toward the wall and everyone filed into the foyer.
“I didn’t do anything,” Meg said. She felt six pairs of eyes on her and she wished desperately that T.J. had come with her. “I came into the house and saw it just before Nathan found me.”
“It didn’t just get there on its own,” Kenny said, backing up his friend.
Kumiko wasn’t so easily convinced. “Then where’s the paint? If she’d just painted the wall, she’d still have a brush and a can or something.”
“She could have stashed them after she used them,” Nathan said. He wasn’t giving up his case.
“Then why would she come back to the scene of the crime, moron?” Ben asked. “Just to throw you off?”
“Well … um …” Poor Nathan. He clearly hadn’t thought things through.
“Besides,” Ben continued. He walked behind Meg and gestured to the trail of dirt and water she’d left as she came into the house. “She’s dripping wet and covered in mud. Clearly her footsteps stop right where she’s standing. She never went anywhere near the wall.”
Meg could have hugged him.
“I guess,” Nathan grumbled. He sounded less than convinced.
“Wait,” Kenny said, looking around. “Where’s Vivian?”
“And T.J.?” Minnie added.
Crap. As scared as Meg had been to tell everyone about Vivian before, the second slash mark made it even worse.
“There’s …,” she started. She looked from face to face. How would they take this? Would they blame her? “There’s been an accident.”
T.J. had managed to get Vivian’s body pretty well covered by the time Meg led the rest of the group down the side of the hill. He’d anchored the tarp with heavy rocks from the shore and tucked the sides down beneath the log onto which she’d fallen. Nathan and Kenny insisted on seeing the body for themselves, and Meg wasn’t sure if it was because they didn’t believe she was dead or didn’t believe she’d died as the result of an accident. Either way, the two of them traipsed down the muddy hill and T.J. carefully pulled the tarp away. From where Meg stood on the walkway, she couldn’t see the body, but the shocked, drawn looks on the boys’ faces reminded her only too well of what they found underneath.
Meg was the last one to climb back up the walkways to the house. She lingered behind, not wanting to partake in the inevitable conversation happening ahead of her. The deaths, the slash marks, the fact that they were currently cut off from the rest of the world. She didn’t need to hear it again. Even the relentless rain was preferable.
Once again, she paused at the spot where Vivian must have lost her footing and fallen to her death. It seemed so pointless, so preventable. Her eyes traced the broken railing. If only it hadn’t been raining, or the railing hadn’t been so freaking old. It must have been rotted to have given way like that. Without thinking, Meg bent over to examine it.
While the one side of the wooden railing had been splintered by the impact of Vivian’s body, the other side, the spot right at the turn in the walkway, was broken cleanly most of the way through, then, just at the back, looked as if the wood had snapped. There was a vertical groove that permeated almost all the way through the beam. It was clean and man-made.
As if someone had taken a saw to it.
Oh my God.
The railing had been cut intentionally.
Meg reared back. Half of her wanted to tell someone about her discovery, but would they believe her? Nathan was still convinced she’d painted the second slash on the wall, and if this discovery meant what she thought it did …
“You okay?”
T.J. stood on the platform above her. She beckoned him over. “Look at this.”
T.J. carefully picked his way down the precarious walkway to the broken railing. “Isn’t this the same spot you almost fell?”
“Yeah.” Meg pointed to the broken railing. “And check this out.”
T.J. bent down and examined the splintered wood. “She must have slipped too, only there was no one here to catch her. How horrible.”
“But look,” Meg said, tracing the saw mark with her finger. “That’s no accident.”
T.J.’s fingers grazed against Meg’s as he felt the vertical cut. “You think someone did this on purpose?” he said after a moment.
“Maybe?” Meg was suddenly nervous, afraid of saying exactly what she thought.
“It could still have been an accident,” T.J. said, his eyes fixed on the broken railing. “Someone could have been doing repairs and just forgotten to finish this section.”
“Do you think we should tell someone?”
T.J. stood up suddenly. He gazed down at the tarp that covered Vivian’s body, then up to the house. Finally, his eyes rested on Meg. “Not yet,” he said. “Let’s wait and see what happens, okay? I think everyone’s on edge. This might make it worse.”
“Okay.” He was right, of course. After Nathan’s reaction over the last red slash, Meg was pretty sure he’d be accusing her of cutting the handrail as well. Still, it seemed weird not to say something. Maybe if they figured out a way to contact the police, she could mention it.
Meg shivered. If.
“Come on, let’s get you inside.” T.J. guided her up the walkway toward the house. “You need some dry clothes.”
Meg’s skin was icy cold by the time she reached the garret. She stripped off her coat, then her sweatshirt, and kicked off her boots and soaking-wet pajama bottoms. She pulled her journal out of her pocket—dry, thankfully—and tossed it on the bed while she dug through a pile of her clothes and grabbed the warmest items she could find. Jeans, a long-sleeved shirt with a sweater over it, thick socks, coat, and her fingerless gloves. She couldn’t find her brush so she borrowed Minnie’s and dragged it through her wet hair, pulling it up into a high ponytail.
Meg lingered in the garret. She didn’t want to go downstairs. By the time she and T.J. made it back to the house, everyone had gathered in the living room to discuss what they should do next. But after her discovery on the walkway, she kind of wanted to squirrel herself away in the garret until the ferry came back the next morning. Despite T.J.’s conviction that the whole thing was a tragic accident, the details surrounding Vivian’s death nagged at her. Was it really an accident? Or could it have been intentional?
She was overreacting. There could have been other reasons for the man-made damage to the handrail. Like T.J. said, maybe the Lawrences had been doing repairs to the walkway last time they were at the house, and that section was left unfinished. That made sense. They might not even have known the railing was damaged.
But what about the paint? That was a problem she couldn’t explain away. There had been red paint in the closet of the Nemesis. It had been removed recently—like within the last twelve hours—and there were red paint slashes on the wall of the foyer. Two of them. Both corresponding to deaths. Someone had known that both Lori and Vivian were dead before their bodies were discovered by everyone else.
Someone knew they were going to die.
Meg leaned against a window sill and stared out into the cloudy grayness. She felt knotted up inside, a mix of fear and apprehension and disbelief. Her mind raced. Was she really suggesting that Lori and Vivian had been murdered? Or at lea
st that someone had known about their deaths and not told anyone? It was ludicrous. Wasn’t it?
And yet there were two deaths. One might have been a tragedy, but two? She couldn’t believe Vivian’s death was just an accident. Not with the sabotaged handrail. And the slashes. Even if Lori had painted the first slash herself as some sort of morbid “screw you” to the world, who made the second mark?
Something had been off ever since they arrived on the island. Meg had tried to ignore it—the strangeness of the guest list, Jessica’s absence, and then that creepy nonsensical DVD. The DVD … Meg recalled the conversation Lori and Vivian had after the video ended. Someone’s out to get us. I know what you did. Lori and Vivian had been talking about something or someone, an incident at school that no one else knew about. What if they were connected?
Meg pulled away from the window and sat down on the edge of the bare bed. She desperately wanted to talk to someone about it, but bringing all of this up in front of everyone downstairs seemed about as appealing as walking through a field of broken glass barefoot, and T.J. thought she should keep it to herself for now. Still, her mind raced. She needed to organize her thoughts.
Without thinking, she reached out a hand for her journal.
The moment she held it in her hand, Meg realized something was wrong. She always kept a thin silver pen tucked into the journal. But it was gone. No bulge between the pages. She gazed down at the black fake-leather book and though it looked exactly like her own journal, the cover was more worn, more aged in a way Meg couldn’t quite put her finger on. Kind of prematurely old. It felt heavy, brittle, like a book that had been dropped in the bathtub then left to dry out in the sun for a month. The attached ribbon bookmark hung in tatters between the pages, sticking out the bottom like a splayed peacock’s tail, and the whole thing smelled musty.
One thing was for sure—it definitely wasn’t Meg’s journal.
Two thoughts jumped into her mind. Where the hell was her journal, and how did this one get in her room? She glanced around the disaster that was the garret—her journal must be somewhere in the mess. And this one was probably in the room, left there by a former resident or guest, and Minnie had uncovered it in her mad search for her meds.
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