Journey's End

by Rachel Hawkins

  She almost said all of that to Bel and her mum, but the words seemed stuck in her throat as she kept staring out at the sea. Any minute now, the boats would reappear. They’d have to.

  But they stood there for what felt like forever, and there was nothing. Just the fog on the water, rolling and almost pulsing, and Nolie definitely thought she was going to throw up now.

  “Stop!” she heard Bel’s mum call out, and for a second, she thought it was an order not to cry. But when she looked up, Bel’s mum was waving her arms over her head at the men approaching the harbor, men who were clearly heading toward their own boats.

  “Don’t!” she yelled again, and then jogged off toward them. She was too far away for Nolie or Bel to hear what she was saying, but they both watched her shake her head as she spoke to one of the men, a dark-haired guy in an olive-green jacket. Both of them kept gesturing out at the Boundary, their faces red from more than just the wind.

  “Mum is right,” Bel said softly, her fingers flexing against Nolie’s. “She’s telling them not to go. And they shouldn’t. They’ll just get sucked in, too.”

  Nolie gave a violent shiver that had nothing to do with the cold. “Like a horror movie,” she said, her stomach still rolling. “Everyone goes looking for the people who’ve disappeared, and then they disappear.”

  Bel didn’t reply, but her grip got tighter.

  Nolie watched Bel’s mum argue with the man in the jacket, wondering what the heck they could do now. This was big. Really big. If her dad didn’t come back, would they call her mom back in Georgia? Should she call her now? And say what? “Hi, Mom, this trip to Scotland hasn’t gone so well, mostly because Dad disappeared in a magical fog bank.”

  “What are we going to do?” she heard herself say, her voice sounding high and thin to her own ears. The more she stared at the sea, the stranger—and worse—she felt, like everything inside of her was shaking. People didn’t come back from the Boundary. That was its whole deal.

  “Al,” Bel said, giving Nolie’s hand another squeeze. “We have Al, and that . . . has to mean this time is different, right?”

  Nolie looked over at Bel. “Al,” she repeated, and then nodded quickly. “Yeah, exactly. We can . . . we can fix this.”

  She didn’t know how, but the words made her feel better at least, and Nolie lifted her head, her eyes searching out Albert’s dark hair or Nessie hat, but there was no sign of him.

  Bel’s mum was making her way back to them now, scrubbing a hand over her hair. As she got closer, she turned toward Nolie, and Nolie noticed again just how much Bel’s mum looked like Bel, with her little nose and bright hazel eyes.

  “Nolie,” she said, “is anyone else at the Institute right now?”

  It was such an unexpected question that Nolie could only shake her head, confused. “N-no,” she managed to say, thinking back to a talk she and her dad had just had on their way into the village to pick up breakfast. “Dr. Burkhart is in Inverness for the next two days. It’s just Dad right now. Or it . . . it was . . .” Her voice seemed to disappear in her suddenly tightening throat, and she felt Bel squeeze her hand again, their fingers still tightly interlocked.

  Bel’s mum gave a quick nod. “All right,” she said. “You can stay with us until this all gets sorted out, and . . .” Nolie could see Mrs. McKissick suck in a deep breath as she glanced back out at the harbor, then again to her. “I suspect you’ll be wanting to call your mum.”

  Nolie did want to call her mom. A lot. But she also knew that if she did, she wouldn’t be able to lie to her about what was happening out here. Nolie had always been a terrible liar, never really needing to lie about anything. And if she told Mom what had happened . . .

  Still, she shook her head no, and Bel’s mum gave her a tight, forced smile in reply.

  “They’ll probably be back soon anyway,” Mrs. McKissick said. “Just . . . sailed into the fog a bit, and she’ll chug right back out again. We’re all going to feel right silly in a few minutes, I’d reckon.”

  Nolie really hoped that was true, but they stood there for nearly an hour, and nothing happened. And the longer they waited, the more Nolie thought about her dad, about how much she’d missed him just over these past six months. What if she never saw him again at all?

  After a long, long while, Bel’s mum looked back at the two of them and said, “I have to get Jack from nursery. Bel, can you go close up the shop? And then we’ll . . .”

  She didn’t bother finishing the sentence, and Nolie didn’t really blame her. What was there to say, after all? We’ll figure out some way to save everyone from the fog that just ate two boats right in front of our faces?

  She headed off toward the little daycare Jack went to, and Nolie and Bel headed for the shop, both of them lost in their own thoughts.

  When they opened the door, Nolie was surprised to see Albert peeking out from behind the rack of silly hats.

  “How did you get in here?” Nolie asked, and Albert shrugged, pointing at the door.

  “It was open,” he said, “and I wanted a new pair of trousers.” Nolie noticed that he was still wearing the jersey Bel had given him, but now he wore black track pants with an outline of Scotland in white down one leg. “I’ll pay you back for them,” he told Bel, who just waved a hand at him.

  “Are you both all right?” he asked, stepping out into the store. “I saw what happened,” he continued, nodding at the window and the Boundary beyond. “I wanted to go out, but—”

  “No,” Bel said quickly. “It’s better that you didn’t.” Then she glanced around, and gestured both Nolie and Al to the back of the store and into the big storage room where all the extra stuff was kept.

  While the front of the store was cozy and lamp-lit, this room had concrete floors, lots of metal shelving, and fluorescent lights. Nolie grimaced as she looked for a place to sit.

  Albert dumped a crate of stuffed sheep onto the floor, flipping it over so he could sit on it, and while Nolie wanted to tell him to be nicer to Sir Woolington’s siblings, she just gathered them up in her arms and put them on a shelf behind her.

  Bel was still standing in the middle of the room, chewing on her thumbnail, her eyes focused somewhere just over Nolie’s shoulder.

  Nolie didn’t think she was actually looking at anything, though.

  It was Albert who spoke first. “D’ye see now?” he asked. “Why they kept it secret? It’ll start up here, too, just like it did in my time. They’ll send a few more boats, and when those go missing and the fog comes closer, they’ll start talking about the legends. About the lighthouse.”

  “Then what?” Nolie asked, her sneakers squeaking on the floor. “Even if someone did go out there to light it, that person would get stuck, too. Like you did, all . . . preserved, like a fossil.”

  “S’pose fossil is better than zombie,” Albert muttered.

  Ignoring that, Nolie folded her arms and said, “Wait. But when you lit the light, did those people who’d gone missing come back?”

  “He wouldn’t know,” Bel interjected. “He was being a fossil.”

  “Oh, right,” Nolie mused, and from his place on the crate, Albert threw up his hands.

  “I wasna a fossil,” he said, but then his expression changed.

  “They could have,” he said. “They might have. That tearoom you took me to. I told you there’d been a building there, but the fog took it. I can’t be sure that’s the same building, but it . . . it could be?”

  “But the pictures,” Bel countered, chewing on her thumbnail. “On the back wall of the shop. Those people were always missing. They didn’t come back.”

  “Or they did, and the village never talked about it,” Nolie answered, her heart pounding faster now. “You heard Albert; they’ve always kept things to do with the Boundary a secret. Maybe he lit that light back in 1918, and everything just . . . went back to ho
w it was, but no one talked about it.”

  “So what?” Bel asked, dropping her hand. “You think if we lit the light, we could get our dads out?”

  It was almost too scary to hope, but Nolie nodded anyway. “I think we could.”

  And then Bel sighed, crossing her arms. “In that case,” she said, “I think there’s something we need to do.”

  CHAPTER 22

  “IS THIS THE BEST FONT TO SAY ‘WE’RE NOT CRAZY, Please Listen to Us’?”

  Bel leaned over Nolie’s shoulder, looking at the computer screen. They were at the Institute, using Nolie’s dad’s laptop. Al sat at the other computer, the big desktop one, playing solitaire.

  “I’m not sure there is a font for that, Nolie,” Bel told her, “but I like this one.”

  The words were big and black and serious. TOWN MEETING, they proclaimed, AT TOWN HALL, TONIGHT, 6:00.

  The idea was that no one would know who called the meeting, so they might actually get people to show up. It was also why they wanted the meeting to be so soon—the less time people had to ask who might be calling this, the better.

  “Brilliant!” Al enthused from his corner, and Nolie looked over her shoulder at him.

  “You like the font?” she asked, and Al turned, blinking.

  “The what? I just won a wee card game on this box,” he explained, waving his hand on the screen. “What else can I do on here?”

  Nolie turned back to her flyer. “Al, we do not have time to get into the internet with you right now, so please just . . . stay there with the card game, okay?”

  Al took that well enough, shrugging and opening another game of solitaire.

  “Should we say what the meeting is about?” Nolie asked Bel.

  Taking a seat next to Nolie at the long table, Bel shook her head. “They’ll know, I’d think. What else is there to talk about besides what happened today?”

  Nolie highlighted the time of the meeting, making it bigger and turning it yellow before shaking her head and making the words black again. “All kinds of things,” she said before hitting print. “How great the stuffed sheep in your shop are, Al’s record at Dance Your Pants Off . . .”

  It was typical Nolie, making a joke whenever she could, but Bel could tell her heart wasn’t really in it. She was still looking at the screen, tapping the knuckle of one finger against her mouth, her knee bouncing underneath the table. And Bel hadn’t missed the way Nolie had blinked back tears when they’d come into the Institute . . . the big house had seemed so empty and quiet.

  Not that Bel was feeling much better. But this, having a plan, doing something, helped. The printer began spitting out copies of the flyer, and Bel looked over at the machine, taking a deep breath. It wasn’t that she thought this was a bad idea, exactly, but she wasn’t sure how her mum was going to react. Still, if there was a chance they could work out how to save their dads and Jaime, then it was worth the risk. No one else in the town knew what to do, but they did. They had Al.

  The smell of hot ink filled the little room as more and more flyers shot out of the printer. Bel went to stand beside Nolie, crossing her arms over her chest. “How many of those are you printing?” she asked, and now it was Nolie’s turn to shrug.

  “Two hundred? Figure that’ll give us enough to really paper the town.”

  Eyes widening, Bel looked at the growing stack of flyers and nodded. “Yeah, that’ll . . . that’ll do it, all right.”

  “Ah!” Al suddenly cried from behind them, and they both turned to see him scooting back from the computer. “Nolie, I’ve done something!”

  There was a graphic on the screen of a phone wiggling back and forth, and with a hiss, Nolie pushed off from her table, sending her rolling chair crashing into Al’s desk. “My mom,” she said.

  “Are you going to answer it?” Bel asked, and Nolie glanced over at her.

  “I have to. If I don’t, she’ll be worried and try to call Dad.”

  Al scooted back as Nolie clicked something, and then a square appeared on the screen, showing a woman with blond hair and Nolie’s smile. She was in a bright white kitchen, cheerful yellow curtains hung over a sink behind her, and Bel realized it must still be really early in Georgia.

  “Noles?” Nolie’s mom asked, and Nolie leaned over, waving at the little camera at the top of the computer monitor.

  “Hi, Mom!” she said, a little too loudly, and the woman on the screen immediately frowned.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, and Nolie sighed, shifting so that her chair was closer to the screen.

  “Nothing!” she insisted, but when she started drumming her fingers on the desk, Bel quietly reached over and covered them, just out of sight of the camera. Al was still sitting off to the side, his mouth hanging open.

  “That’s a thing you can do on these, too?” he whispered. “Talk to people through the screen?”

  Nolie waved a hand at him under the desk, hoping her mom didn’t see. “Just, you know, hanging out. Doing Scottish things.”

  Nolie’s mom didn’t seem convinced. She had her lips pressed in a tight line and her eyes scanning her own screen, like if she could just see through it, she’d see whatever was going on with her daughter.

  “Are you by yourself?” she asked, and Nolie shook her head, gesturing for Bel to come into view.

  “No, I’m hanging out with friends, see? This is Bel and this”— Nolie reached over, dragging Al closer—“is Albert, and um, they’re my friends. My new Scottish friends.”

  Bel and Al both waved at the camera, and Nolie’s mom settled back, relieved. “Oh, good! What are the three of you up to?”

  Bel tried not to chew on her fingernails, and Al was already slinking back out of the shot, but Nolie just said, “Oh, you know, calling a town meeting to talk about how we need to go light a magical lighthouse.”

  Biting back a squeak, Bel stood very still, just staring at the computer and wondering if Nolie had lost her mind with all this stress. But Nolie’s mom just laughed. She laughed the same way Nolie did, big and loud, showing lots of teeth.

  “Well, I certainly don’t want to keep you from that,” she said. “But I missed your face. Have you sent me a letter?”

  “I sent three yesterday,” Nolie said, reaching out to tap the screen. “And I miss your face, too.”

  “And you got the package I sent? With the book you wanted?”

  Nolie’s shoulders went up a little bit, and she ducked her head, not looking at Bel or Al. Bel wondered what that was about.

  “Yup, got it, thanks,” Nolie said quickly, and her mom smiled.

  “You three be good, okay?” Nolie’s mom said, and Bel gave another wave and a nod. “We will!” she said, striving for some of Nolie’s brightness.

  “We will,” Al echoed, still far out of the camera’s sight.

  Nolie’s mom leaned a little closer. “And call me back tonight or tomorrow, okay? Alone? I have some questions.” She gave a broad wink at that, and Nolie groaned, the tips of her ears turning pink.

  Nolie waved a hand and said, “Okay, okay, I love you, Embarrassing Mom.”

  “I love you, Embarrassed Daughter,” her mom replied, and then, after blowing Nolie a kiss, she was gone.

  Nolie took a deep breath, leaning back in her chair, hands on top of her head.

  “Why did you do that?” Bel asked. “Tell her the truth?”

  Nolie sat up, hands dropping heavily into her lap. “I can’t lie to my mom. I’m terrible at it. So I figured I would just tell the truth, see if that worked out. And it did, so yay.”

  The printer was quiet now, all their flyers printed, and Bel went to gather them as Nolie rose from her chair. Al was still giving the computer a longing look, and Nolie snapped her fingers at him.

  “Flyers and meeting now, solitaire later,” she promised. And then she snapped her fingers again,
looking up. “Ooh! Hold on!” she said, and took off down the hall.

  Bel shook her head, picking up the flyers and handing some of them to Al. “I don’t know if this will work,” she confessed, and he took the papers, jaw clenched.

  “You should let me tell them,” he said, and Bel shook her head, fingers tightening around her own stack of flyers.

  “Al, we talked about this. The less weird we can make this seem, the more chance they have of listening to us. We just need to tell them about the light, not . . . not you. Just in case.”

  “What is it you think they’ll do to me?” Al asked, leaning one hip against the table. “Take me to a laboratory, cut me up?”

  “Worse,” Nolie said, coming back into the room, a backpack slung over one shoulder. “Put you on reality TV. Are we ready?”

  Bel nodded, heading for the door. “We have to move quickly,” she told the other two over her shoulder. “Get as many up as we can, as fast as we can.”

  With that, she flung open the front door of the Institute, only to find herself running smack into someone.

  “Oh!” Bel cried, staggering back.

  And then she realized who it was standing there.

  CHAPTER 23

  “LESLIE,” BEL SAID, STUNNED, AND LESLIE WIGGLED HER fingers, almost like a wave.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’m sorry, I just . . . I heard what happened, and I thought you might be up here with—” Her gaze drifted over Bel’s shoulder to where Nolie stood, still holding her backpack, Al just behind her with his stack of flyers.

  “I’m sorry,” Leslie said again, meeting Bel’s eyes for what felt like the first time in forever. And Bel thought she might be apologizing for more than what had happened with the boats.

  “Okay,” Bel replied, because she didn’t know what else to say. Then she cleared her throat and handed Leslie some of the flyers. “Do you want to . . . do you want to help us put these up around town?”