She shoved the extra cup of coffee she’d brought into his hands and then brushed past him into the house. “Drink up.”
There were still discarded paper plates on the foyer table from the service the day before, and she fought the urge to start cleaning. It would send the wrong message.
“Earl’s things?” Mia reminded Cash because the caffeine definitely hadn’t hit his bloodstream yet. He scrubbed a hand over his face, then cleared his throat, gesturing to the stairs.
“Yeah, bedroom, attic,” he said, his voice thick. It was clear he hadn’t quite woken up yet or talked to anyone else, and she wondered if Lacey had gone back to the mansion. “Take your pick. I’ll be in the kitchen.”
He wouldn’t meet her eyes, and before she could react, he’d stepped around her toward the hallway.
The behavior was dismissive at best, shifty at worst, the tone change from the pier the day before enough to cause whiplash. This again was the man who had grown into a stranger, no longer the boy she’d known so well and thought she’d caught a glimpse of yesterday.
Had grief been enough to strip the years away? Had it really happened? The world tilted, just a bit, and left her wondering just how fragile her grasp of the truth was.
Mia shook off the heaviness that had settled into her shoulders. This wasn’t the time for doubt. That could come later.
When she was sure Cash was puttering around in the kitchen, Mia started for the stairs. The bedroom was daunting, the thought of the number of Post-its she’d have to comb through enough to direct her steps toward the doorway of the attic. There was sure to be more clutter, but there was a better chance that it would be comprehensible.
Not that she was even sure what she was looking for.
A souvenir from the night? The razor blades that had been drawn across their wrists? A pregnancy test from Monroe? Each option seemed more ludicrous than the last. But this was what she had to work with.
Mia checked her phone when she got to the top of the stairs of the dusty room. No service, no data, no nothing. It had been like that since the first flake had fallen last evening. The storm was mild for Maine, heavy and steady rather than wild and raw. Yet, still, it had been enough to knock out the already-precarious communication none of them could rely on. Most people on the island didn’t care. They carried walkie-talkies with them all through the winter months, anyone they needed probably in a one-hundred-yard radius.
But Mia hadn’t even received a text that Izzy had landed in Rockport, and she knew Quinn, at least, hadn’t returned. She wasn’t worried, per se. There was an awareness, though, at the base of her spine, that she was effectively alone on the island, cut off from backup.
She shoved the cell into her jeans pocket and then shrugged out of her damp jacket as she crossed the well-trodden floorboards. The dust that settled like a light film over most surfaces had been disturbed in some places, as if someone had been up here recently. Cash? Or Earl?
Light spilled in through the window at the far end, sliding over duct-taped boxes and sheet-shrouded lumps that Mia assumed were furniture.
It was only when she found the box labeled PICTURES that she stopped. With her nails, she ripped at the fraying tape holding the cardboard together until it finally gave beneath her fingers. Inside were stacks of albums—leather, fabric, cheap, plain, designed. If Mia had to guess, she’d say they were the work of Tess Bishop, Cash’s mother. She’d seemed the type to hoard moments, tucking them away into plastic sleeves, protecting them and hiding them at the same time.
Mia sat down so that her back was against a couch that smelled vaguely of cat urine despite the fact that Mia knew the Bishops had never owned a pet.
Her fingertips traced the gold stamp on the deep mahogany leather of the first album in the bunch. The B in Bishop curved and coiled so that it was more art than letter.
The pictures inside were of Tess and Earl’s wedding. She’d worn a high-collared gown, he a cherry-red suit. The former seemed to match the memory of the woman who had been more background noise than anything else during Mia’s childhood. But Earl was a surprise. So were the flushed, happy cheeks, the wide grin, the way he was dipping Tess in the middle of the dance floor. Earl had always come across as stern, unbending, allergic to lightness and gaiety. Had he changed so much? Or had she known him only through the prism of a teenager’s viewpoint, unwilling and uninterested to recognize that there was a person behind the authoritative mask?
Not for the first time did she wish they’d talked to him when they’d landed on the island.
She placed the album aside and reached for the next one. Soon she realized they were in chronological order, and sped through the ones of young Cash, with a reluctant smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.
When she finally got to his teenage years, she slowed down. There she and Cash were, their smiles wide and carefree.
It was strange seeing the moments caught in time when she knew the real life that had been lived in the seconds, the minutes, the days on either side of the careless candids.
There was the first night they’d kissed. Cash’s fingers had brushed along the waistband of Mia’s jeans, then hooked into one of the belt loops to pull her closer. Asher had been down at the rocks, too, but neither of them had paid him much attention.
Had they always overlooked Asher? Had he cared at all? She hadn’t thought so. But maybe she just hadn’t thought at all.
She flipped through a few more pictures, past the winter dance that had been held in the gym of the four-room school. Asher had gone stag, but that hadn’t meant much at the time, what with five guys and four girls total in their age range.
There was a picture of the two of them dancing—her and Asher. It must have been a slow song, because her arms were looped around his shoulders, his hands were pressed into her hips.
They weren’t smiling. Mia’s eyes caught on her own face, and she wondered at the expression there. It wouldn’t have been odd for her to dance with him, but she would have thought they would both make it silly, a joke almost, or a warm hug that they swayed through in time to the music.
An odd sense of unease clawed at her belly. This picture wasn’t silly.
But. They hadn’t been like her and Cash. They’d never been like that.
She turned the page.
Monroe made her first appearance in the albums three pages later.
Mia paused, her hand frozen midair. There was something absolutely captivating about the girl, a quality Mia hadn’t remembered, which radiated off her even through faded film and yellowed corners.
Mia let the plastic sleeve fall so that she could see the picture in full.
It was a snap of Monroe sitting on the rocks down by the beach. Her head was tipped back toward the sun, her throat exposed, silky black hair brushing over her hand where it rested against smooth black stone. Cutoff jean shorts barely hid her long legs, and her white crop top exposed a sliver of stomach. The light caught against the jewel that was nestled in her belly button.
The girl had been beautiful beyond her dark hair and pale skin. Mia saw Lacey in her features, but there was something about Monroe that eclipsed her sister’s nervous prettiness. Maybe it was the hint of lushness at her lips and hips, a promise that had never been realized. Youth interrupted, caught in time, perpetually on the cusp of being spoiled forever by age and cynicism and a deep world-weariness.
But dying young was glamorous only in rock songs and movies.
Mia flipped the page.
Most of the rest of the photos from that summer were a variation of her, Asher, and Cash, just as she would expect. The three of them and their unbreakable bond. Lacey and Monroe made quick cameos, but Mia sensed their presences offscreen far more than they were captured by a lens. Always the boys’ eyes pulled by the two girls who stood beyond the camera.
If there was a better metaphor for that summer, Mia couldn’t name it.
By the time she got to the Firefly Festival, the annual town-w
ide event held to celebrate the solstice, Mia had begun to worry she was wasting her time by indulgently sinking into the past. There had been hints of the dynamics she’d remembered—Asher caught up in Monroe, Mia caught up in Cash—but nothing illuminating enough to warrant the hour she’d spent so far sifting through the static memories.
Except that shot of her and Asher dancing. She pushed the thought aside.
Here, here was something else.
The picture, in front of the hot dog stand at the Firefly Festival, was of Jimmy Roarke, Henry Jackson, and Charles Bell. Charles’s arm was wrapped firmly around Jimmy’s shoulders, and both of them had their heads thrown back, laughing.
Those girls were all scared.
That’s what Jimmy had said, with fear in his eyes, his shoulders hunched. The of him had been implied.
But here they were together, Jimmy and Charles, just weeks before the lighthouse night. Their amusement, their comfort with each other, was clearly genuine.
So had something happened to change that?
Or were Jimmy’s memories faulty, distorted? And, if they were, how had they gotten that way?
Her gaze snagged on a picture at the bottom right of the page, distracting her.
The photo had been taken at dusk if not later, the lack of light challenging the capabilities of the rudimentary camera. Mia and Lacey were the main subjects, their tipsy smiles apparent even to Mia now. Lacey had been very pretty when taken on her own, separate from her sister. She’d worn her hair in a cut that had highlighted all the sharp points on her face, but that harshness was softened by her eyes, which were deep blue and lined with classically attractive, sooty lashes.
Both Mia and Lacey presented a different kind of youth than Monroe had. Where Monroe was out of reach, Mia and Lacey were accessible, attainable. There was a pimple erupting just above Mia’s eyebrow, and cheap, too-pink blush smeared in the hollows of Lacey’s cheeks instead of on the ridges. They’d grown into those faces, adulthood realized, whereas Monroe had been left behind, unspoiled.
If Mia hadn’t been looking for something off in the picture, she would have missed the couple in the background. They were more shadows than anything else, limbs catching the flash at just the wrong angle, faces obscured by smudged ink and time. But Mia recognized the pair easily.
Monroe and Cash.
And just on the edge of the picture stood Asher, watching them. Neon slid across his features, throwing him into sharp relief against the general blurriness of the scene. Everything about his stance screamed anger, from the fists at his side to the tension in his shoulders.
There they were, all five of them, just weeks before Monroe’s and Asher’s apparent suicides, and Mia’s apparent attempt, caught in a tableau of teenage jealousy, ignorance, and lust. The waves of each were so strong they crashed into Mia’s chest, catching along the throbbing pulse of her ulcer, slipping acid into the edges of the pain.
Mia had been naive to think they’d been carefree that summer up until that night. The silvery, thin lines of emotion that connected them were all but visible in the photo.
She slipped her finger into the plastic pocket and wrested the picture out into the present. Here. This is what she’d been overlooking with all the pregnancy rumors, the older men, the mysterious artist.
The five of them, the way their lives had touched, intersected, and then blown apart.
Trying to strip away the noise of the past few days, Mia hunched over until her nose was almost brushing the picture, as if getting closer and closer and closer would help her see the answer that lay beneath the glossy patina.
At the center of it was Cash, always Cash. The one who hadn’t been there that night at the lighthouse. The one whom Izzy hadn’t liked or trusted. The one who’d lied about talking to the reporter, the one who’d cried and made her think he was better than that first quick impression she’d gotten of him at the bar. The one who was talking about the Bells. The one who was dating a woman with bruises on her arms.
What was lacking was a motive. Not for the reporter’s death—that she could explain. But for Monroe and Asher, and even Mia.
It was the loop she kept getting stuck in.
Her phone vibrated in her jeans, just as she leaned back away from the picture in frustration. She scrambled for it, even as she realized the one quick ping was just a text, not a call.
Mia breathed out in relief when she saw Izzy’s name.
The happiness curdled when she read the text.
They’re all lying. The artist was the body in the bay. Get the hell out of there, Hart.
The words didn’t even make sense on first read. It took three more tries for it to sink in, and once it did, her pulse kicked up, fast enough that she could actually feel the beat in her throat.
The artist. Peter. A gadfly that had buzzed at the edges of her mind ever since Mia had heard of him.
They’re all lying.
Were they? All of them? How many people had seen the body? The guys who had pulled him out of the water. But anyone could have mistaken two middle-aged Caucasian men, especially with his face so bloated with the sea. They hadn’t even been to town since Mia had arrived, which made her think they kept to themselves. And when they’d interviewed them . . . hadn’t they said the man had been an artist? Should that have been a red flag?
Her brain tripped then, sadness slipping into the new hollowness beneath her breastbone. Sammy. He had to have known, there was no way around it. At the very least he was an accomplice.
She thought back to the first day, the easiness of his welcome, the familiarity of their banter.
Was it just Sammy? Was he covering his own tracks or someone else’s? It was possible that no one beyond him had seen the body. The men from the boat had called him directly, probably. If he told everyone in town it was the reporter, why would anyone question him? Especially with Mia and Izzy on the way.
They’re all lying.
The words focused and then blurred before sharpening once more. She blinked hard, staring at her phone’s screen.
Of course, they were all lying. It was the one truth Mia knew, and knew well.
But was there more to it? Did Izzy know something else, something that hadn’t come through on her messages yet? Mia’s phone lagged, trying to load other texts, but then it promptly shut down.
Frustration coiled in her belly, climbed into her esophagus. This goddamn island. Her fingers trembled in her effort not to fling her cell across the room.
She started to push herself to her feet, not knowing what her next move would be yet, but knowing that sitting among dusty memories in the Bishops’ attic was no longer productive.
As she rocked to her knees, she realized that Cash was standing there, still and silent, only a few steps away. On instinct, she flinched, her hand going to her holster, as she prayed her distraction hadn’t just gotten her killed.
“Mia.” Cash’s voice was eerie, stripped down of all the bitterness that had turned it rough downstairs.
The fine hairs on her forearms stood on end, her skin pulling tight into goose bumps as the whisper trailed along her nerve endings.
“Cash. You scared me,” Mia said, keeping her hand tucked right up against her gun as she slowly, very slowly, stood up.
“Sorry,” Cash said, but there was an emptiness to the apology. There was no rueful smile to accompany it, nor did he try to laugh off the uneasiness that turned the air around them brittle.
She toed at the album still lying on the floor, making him split his attention. “Was just looking at some old pictures.”
He nodded but didn’t say anything further.
“I hadn’t realized Jimmy and Charles Bell were friends,” she said, because her body might be on the verge of slipping into fight or flight, but her mind was stuck on the dots, the outliers that kept cropping up at perfect places to fit an image that seemed too easy to draw.
Cash’s head tipped to the side, and she couldn’t tell if his eyes were ac
tually empty or the blankness was because of the shadows from the attic. “I don’t think they were. I actually . . .”
“What?” Mia asked, her hand still on her gun, even as he continued to keep his distance. The blood was no longer rushing past her ears, so she could hear the house sigh and settle with the wind, could hear the rumble of a washing machine, could hear any potential shift in Cash’s body that signaled an attack.
“I got the impression Jimmy wasn’t too fond of the guy.” Cash lifted one shoulder, his arms relaxed by his sides. She was beginning to feel foolish for her initial scare.
“How?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean how did you get that impression?” The photo of the three of them told a different story. What was the truth? A moment snapped in time, or a gut feeling a decade and a half later. It kept cropping up. That disparity. Mia’s memories acted more like pictures because hers were safe, removed, untainted. But everyone else’s had bent.
Or was it the other way around? She swayed on her feet, just a little, trying to ignore the question that had started as a whisper and then grown to a howl she pretended not to hear when she stared at the ceiling of her childhood bedroom.
What if her mind had simply supplied her with pretty images to paper over horror lingered in reality?
Cash shrugged again. “Don’t know really. Always just was. No one ever said it out loud.”
She shook her head. “You noticed when you were a kid? When you were that young? You thought Jimmy didn’t like Charles?”
Because she hadn’t thought much about any of the adults that summer. Not beyond avoiding getting yelled at and figuring out which house was empty so they could sneak some liquor.
Cash’s brow collapsed. “I mean . . . I guess not, no.”
Right. Her mind grasped for something that was just a wisp, insubstantial but not nothing, either.
Mia dropped her gaze to the floor, and it caught on the photo she’d pulled out of the album.
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