“You know, I may have some more formula back in my kayak,” Natalie lied. “Would it be all right if I went to get it?”
“That’s a silly question,” Miranda said.
“What she means,” Reggie said, “is of course you can. You’re not a prisoner here, Natalie.” Reggie paused to look up and give her a wide grin, which made it look like his singer tattoo was trying to climb into his mouth. “Do what you need to do.”
“Thanks,” Natalie said, smiling right back.
Not wanting to leave Eva alone with these people any longer than she had to, Natalie bounded down the cabin steps and through the yard of brown ferns. She traced her way back to the jetty, committing each turn and twist in the path to memory. Once she got there, she saw that her kayak had been hoisted out of the water and pulled onshore. She wasn’t surprised that they’d found it, but the sight gave her a sinking feeling. The day hatch lay open—clearly they’d searched it. Natalie took a few steps closer to see if anything was missing, and that’s when she noticed the hole. It was about the size of a littleneck clam, smooth around the edges, drilled right through the kayak bottom. As fatal as a hole in the heart. Unless she patched it up, the kayak would sink like a stone.
“They aren’t good people,” a familiar voice said very softly.
Natalie froze. One of the bee-suited searchers had followed her to the jetty. He was the tall one—the man who had wept at the news of two vexed girls. Until that very moment, Natalie hadn’t heard him speak. So . . . why was his voice familiar?
“I don’t understand what you mean,” she said, struggling to keep up her part of the act. “They’re helping my sister.”
In answer to this, the man only shook his head.
“They . . . They’re giving her medicine,” she stammered, “to get her fever down.” Natalie peered past him to see if somebody else was out there as well. Was this some kind of test? Some kind of trap?
“Please try to stay calm,” the man whispered, bringing one of his gloved fingers up in front of his tinted visor to make a shushing motion. “They’re watching you. Very carefully. They’re listening. If you get loud, they’re going to hear.”
Even at a whisper, even muffled through the tinted visor, Natalie knew that voice. But before she had a chance to say anything, the man began to unzip his bonnet. Then he pulled it off, revealing a face still wet with tears.
It was her father.
• • •
So at least there was this—Natalie didn’t get loud. She just stood there, frozen, staring. Her father. He looked different from how she remembered. In just a few months his skin had grown pale, and his hair had thinned. There was a broad, peach-colored scar on his temple, and his opposite ear was blistered and burned. His nose had also changed shape and fattened. It looked like it had been broken and reset. Maybe more than once.
“Please, please stay quiet,” her dad whispered. “Don’t shout.”
Natalie couldn’t have shouted even if she wanted to. She fought an urge to run to her father and wrap him in a hug. She fought an even stronger urge to shove him off the damn jetty. Instead, she just sat down upon the slatted wood. Her knees felt wobbly, and the jetty swam beneath her.
“Natalie, I—”
“No.” She cut him off. She wasn’t sure what he’d been about to say, but “no” was the correct answer for any and all of it. She suddenly remembered what Reggie had told her, about a stranger joining their group. An honorary searcher.
“It’s you? You’re the new guy?”
“What?”
“The one helping them study Goldsport. That’s you?”
At first her dad could only nod. Then he started again. “Honey—”
“No,” Natalie said.
“Sweetheart—”
“No.”
She had as many “no”s for her dad as he had stupid bullshit garbage words for her.
“Natalie, please. It happened on the first day. Otherwise, I never would have . . .” Her dad trailed off. He glanced over his shoulder. Through the dead bramble, they could see flashes of yellow as searchers came and went in the yard.
“I can’t stay here long,” he said, lowering his voice back to a whisper. He squatted down and began gathering fallen branches for firewood. “I’m pretty sure they believe my story, but Miranda will start asking questions if she sees me hanging around near you.”
Natalie glared.
Her father kept his attention locked on the ground at the base of the dock, searching for sticks. Searching for words. “Look, we don’t have time right now to go through it all, but I was being an idiot, Natalie. I think I must have . . . I must have just been blowing off steam. It was always in the back of my head that I might need to take a few days to cool down. I was always going to come back. But then I met these—”
“You never told me you were going to come back,” Natalie said. “You looked right at me as you packed up that kayak. And then you left.” Her voice was getting dangerously loud, but she couldn’t help herself. Her dad shifted uncomfortably and once more glanced back toward the cabin. He tried to reach out to touch her on the shoulder, but Natalie slapped his hand away. Hard.
“Leaving is leaving.”
“I know,” her dad said.
“You left Mom all alone, and me all alone.”
“I did,” he said.
With those two words, his whole body collapsed within his bee suit. Natalie found it impossible to look at him—both because of her rage and also because of the unbearable shame that was pouring out of the man. She loved him and hated him and was embarrassed for him all at once. So instead, she kept her eyes on the water just beneath their feet. It was crystal clear. A green anemone waved gently up at them.
“The searchers were already here when I arrived,” her dad said, his voice nearly inaudible. “They seemed . . . They pretended to be good people. They asked where I’d come from. I told them Goldsport, only because I didn’t want them finding out about Puffin Island. And then, when I realized how . . .” Her dad tried wiping his tears with the back of his rubber glove, but that only smeared them.
“They did that to you?” Natalie asked. She meant the marks all over his face—the broken nose and burnt ear.
Her father’s eyes darkened. “They did. But it’s nothing. They’re capable of so much worse.”
“I know,” Natalie said. “I saw a video on Reggie’s phone.”
Hearing this, her father’s back straightened. “Does Reggie know?”
Natalie shook her head.
“Thank God,” her father said, glancing around at the woods. “They were getting ready to cross the bay and head into Canada when I met them. The plan was to search the islands on their way. That’s why I’ve been trying to keep them busy here. Keep their attention on Goldsport. It’s also the only reason they decided not to . . .”
Her father didn’t finish. He didn’t have to—Natalie got it. By diverting the searchers and keeping them occupied on the mainland, he’d not only been protecting her, her mother, and the baby, but he’d also been protecting himself. Otherwise, Reggie’s group would have had no more use for him than they’d had for the true woman in the video.
“So you held them off going to Puffin Island by telling them that there was a vexed girl in Goldsport,” Natalie said. It was the closest thing to a peace offering she could manage.
“Yes,” her father said.
“So that’s not . . . It’s not true, is it?”
For the first time since he’d sat down beside her on the jetty, her dad looked Natalie directly in the face.
“It used to be,” he said.
PART V
COMMEMORATION
CHAPTER 28
Pay It Back
THERE ARE SOME WORDS THAT, when spoken, become wrecking balls. Astrid’s mother might as well have knocked down the town of Goldsport with her story. The sanctuary would never be the same again—at least not for Astrid, it wouldn’t be. What she’d learned about
her town, about her own family, shook her to her core. How could her grandfather—that wide-grinning, hand-shaking, deal-making, wall-building savior of their history—have done something so evil? The more Astrid thought about it, the more disgusted she became.
Here was the simple, awful truth of it: Ronnie Gold had built this life, her life, on the blood and suffering of other people. It was cruel, and it was unnecessary. There wasn’t an investor in Goldsport who didn’t have at least one bedroom to spare. Hell, they’d converted three of the houses into storage space for antiques and family heirlooms! So, if they’d wanted to, they could easily have kept their promise to the people of Port Emory and shared the sanctuary. To exile them in order to survive was bad enough. But what Astrid’s family had done—what all of the investors had done—was so much worse. They had harmed others, left them out beyond the walls to die or fall wicked simply to preserve their own comfort. To protect their stores of freeze-dried treats, their supply of milk and cheese, their stupid damn billiard rooms. And whether Astrid liked it or not, she was a part of that. Every good thing in her life had been stolen from someone else. In the end, what did it matter that it wasn’t her who’d done the stealing?
Now nothing was going to stop her from going to Puffin Island. It went beyond Astrid’s old childhood curiosity—it had become a matter of duty. There might not be anyone left alive on that little rock in the bay, but if there was, Astrid had to find them and do whatever she could to help. Hank was in complete agreement.
They decided that the best time to sneak away would be during commemoration, when the whole town would be distracted—not to mention drunk and happy. That gave them a few days to get ready. First they went out to the docks to fuel up the lobster boat and pump out the bilge. They gathered food from the dairy garden and underground grocery, taking enough to make a serious peace offering to whomever they might find out there. Eliza may have hated the ice cream, but Astrid was willing to bet that hungry people on the island would be happy to have it. At Hank’s insistence, they also stashed a hunting rifle in the boat, just to be safe.
The preparations reminded Astrid of that time she and Hank once played at running away to the island, when they were children. Despite all of their planning back then, she was pretty sure they’d never have gone through with it. But things were different now. Astrid meant to get to Puffin Island even if she had to swim. Of course, her dad’s thoughts on the issue hadn’t changed a bit since she was a little girl. It was only fair to tell him, and Amblin threw a fit when he heard.
“You are not going anywhere,” he yelled, hammering on the bolted door of the quarantine house. “Neither of you.”
“I’m sorry, Dad,” Astrid said, standing on the other side of the door. “But you can’t stop us.”
“The hell I can’t.” Her father stormed over to one of the barred windows and called out through the heavy-duty screen. “Tommy! Are you there?”
He meant Mr. Collins, who was supposed to be posted on guard duty.
“He isn’t,” Astrid said.
“Chipper! Hey, Chip!”
“Mr. Gregory isn’t there either,” Astrid said. In fact, neither of them had shown up for their last few shifts. She could only guess that the two old men were busy decorating the plaza with streamers and balloons. Still . . . it was a little odd that Henry hadn’t thought to send a replacement.
There was a hard bang from inside the quarantine house—the sound of her father kicking something. “And what about your mother?” he asked, his voice sinking down into an angry rumble. “I suppose she’s just fine with this?”
“Not exactly,” Astrid said. “But she isn’t trying to stop us.”
“She might as well be helping you, then,” Amblin fumed. “It’s stupid, Astrid. This is a stupid way for you to get back at me. It’s unsafe, and immature, and—”
“I’m not getting back at you,” Astrid cut him off.
“Aren’t you?”
“Of course not. How do you . . . ? How do you not get that?” Astrid asked.
There was a long silence from inside the quarantine house. She heard a slide, followed by a soft thump. Her father must have sat himself down upon the floor. When he spoke again, his anger had drained away.
“I shouldn’t have waited so long to tell you,” he said. “But I was going to.”
“I know that you were,” Astrid said.
“I thought if . . . I thought that there might be a way to tell it so that you wouldn’t think I was . . .”
“Think you were what?”
“I don’t know, honey,” he said. “I guess I didn’t want you to hate me.”
“I don’t hate you, Dad.” Astrid took a step closer to the door, sat down in the sand, and tried again. “You were a kid. You couldn’t have stopped it. But I’m still . . .” Words failed her momentarily. “I’m angry. And I’m ashamed.”
“There isn’t any reason for you to be ashamed,” her dad said.
“Of course there is.”
“Neither of us can change what happened.”
“We can’t,” Astrid said. “But if anyone is still left out there, then we need to pay it back. We need to pay something back.” She reached out and touched the door. The wood stank, sticky with dried quiet. “Please don’t worry, Dad. It’s been a long time. There probably isn’t anybody on the island anyway.”
“And if there is?”
Astrid didn’t hesitate. “Then I’m going to talk to them.”
CHAPTER 29
One Crack
COMMEMORATION WAS THE FOLLOWING DAY. The ceremony would begin at dusk, with the hours before a frenzy of last-minute preparations. There were speeches to practice, pits to dig for the clambake, banquet tables to set, champagne to ice, tuxedos to press, and evening gowns to steam. Astrid and Hank, on the other hand, just had one thing left on their to-do list: retrieve the boat key from the Bushkirk house. If they could do so without bumping into Hank’s dad, so much the better.
They made their move in the morning, avoiding the plaza by taking the long way around the greenway and entering through the western hatch. Happy voices echoed down the halls, and they could see fuzzy shapes racing through the layered glass. But they managed to make it all the way to the Bushkirk house without bumping into a soul. They knocked just to be sure that no one was home and then stepped inside.
It was filthy. Half-eaten cans of soup crowded the coffee table in the living room, and the carpet was littered with crumpled tissues. Somebody must have caught a cold. “The key is in my father’s study,” Hank said, casting his eyes over the mess. He hadn’t been home since the day Eliza was shot, and it didn’t look like he’d missed the place. “You can wait here.”
Hank disappeared into the back of the house while Astrid stepped deeper into the living room. She noticed an empty bottle of cough medicine among the many soup cans, along with a packet of heavy-duty painkillers. There was also a thermometer, sticking out from between the couch cushions. Whoever was sick, they had it bad. Astrid hoped that it was Mr. Bushkirk.
“I didn’t hear you come in.”
Astrid started at the voice from above. She looked up to see Klara standing on the second-floor landing. She was dressed in a bathrobe. Her hair was a tangle, and there were shadowed bags under her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Astrid said. “We knocked. Did we wake you up?”
“I didn’t hear any knocking” was Klara’s only answer.
There was a very long and awkward moment when neither of them spoke. Astrid shifted her weight on the dirty carpet. It felt odd to be staring up like this at Hank’s stepmom, who was wearing nothing but a bathrobe. She’d rarely seen Klara in anything other than her Sunday best. The robe revealed the woman’s sharp collarbones. Her skin looked like expensive paper.
“Hank’s just getting something,” Astrid offered. “We won’t be long.”
“Oh . . . I thought he was in his room?”
For a moment Astrid just stared up at her. Had Klara r
eally not noticed that her stepson had been gone for more than a week? Had she gotten worse since the last time Astrid spoke to her, or was this the other kind of unknowing—the willful kind? Klara had been here when Henry had whipped Hank with leather gloves, plastic coat hangers, and his own fat hands. Over the years she must have become an expert at not noticing things.
“Well, he’s not,” Astrid said. “We’ll be out of your hair in a minute.”
“You aren’t in my hair,” Klara said, running her fingers across her scalp as though to double-check. Then she leaned forward and gripped the railing of the stairwell with both hands.
“Can I ask you something? Show you something, I mean? Can I show you something upstairs?”
“Oh. Sure.”
Klara smiled. “Come up with me,” she said, releasing the railing and turning down the second-story landing. Baffled, Astrid followed her. They headed to Hank’s room. The door was open, and Klara walked right in. The room looked very much as Astrid remembered it—bare and boring. There were no posters on the walls, no books on the shelf. It looked like a room in a stranger’s house that Hank had been renting, rather than one he’d grown up in. Clothes hanging in the closet and the unmade bed were the only clues that anybody had ever spent a night here.
“Look what I did,” Klara said.
“What?”
“I didn’t think I could do it, but I did,” Klara said. She sounded proud, grinning sheepishly as she pointed at the bed.
Astrid wasn’t following. She looked at Hank’s bed; it seemed perfectly normal. The big comforter was twisted and overturned, as though from a night of restless sleep. But then she noticed bits of fluff—they looked like cotton balls—strewn here and there. It was . . . stuffing? Astrid stepped closer and saw that there were little gashes punched here and there through the comforter. She pulled back the bedding. The mattress below had holes as well—jagged stab wounds, bleeding stuffing and springs. It was as though the bed had been butchered. A kitchen knife lay in the middle of the mattress, discarded among the fluff.
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