Our Last Echoes

by Kate Alice Marshall

  I was alone.

  VIDEO EVIDENCE

  Recorded by Liam Kapoor

  JUNE 28, 2018, 2:34 AM

  Liam sits on his bed in one of Mrs. Popova’s rooms. He rakes a hand through his hair.

  LIAM: Hey, Mum. Here’s your daily message, as commanded. I can’t sleep. Still. So that’s fun. Dr. Kapoor doesn’t want me here. Still. So that’s also fun.

  He sighs and looks away from the camera, toward the window. He frowns.

  LIAM: Hold on. Someone’s out there.

  He walks to the window. The camera captures his face from below as he peers into the mist. Then he mutters something and switches to record with the rear-facing camera.

  A figure walks past the window—a young woman, indistinct in the mist. She pauses directly in front of Liam and looks toward him, her features obscured.

  LIAM: Sophia? What is she—

  The girl walks away swiftly.

  LIAM: She shouldn’t be out there.

  He moves quickly, dashing out of his room and down the hall. The backdoor gapes open. Liam swears and pauses to shove his feet into his boots.

  LIAM: Just my luck if the new girl falls and breaks her neck on the first night. And it’ll be my fault somehow, I guarantee you . . .

  He jogs out into the mist.

  LIAM: Sophia? Sophia, are you out here?

  The mist is growing thinner, a stiff breeze carrying it away, and a gap reveals the slim figure out on a spit of rock, arms wrapped around herself and hair whipping in the wind.

  LIAM: Sophia!

  The girl looks back. For an instant, Sophia’s strange, solemn features are clear—and then she turns away and steps into the water.

  LIAM: What the hell . . . ?

  She takes a step deeper into the surf.

  LIAM: Stop!

  Liam runs forward, but his untied boots skid out from under him, and he falls with a yelp and a clatter of rock. By the time he scrambles upward, there is no sign of Sophia. And then the camera focuses, and Liam swears again. Sophia stands up to her rib cage in churning water. A swell engulfs her to the neck as it passes, and then she takes another step, farther from shore.

  LIAM: Sophia! Come back! What are you doing? Jesus, that water’s freezing, you’re going to—

  But she only walks onward, and the water folds over her. She vanishes—and does not emerge again.

  LIAM: No. No, come on . . .

  He breathes heavily, stepping toward the water before shying away again. At this point in the summer, water temperatures remain dangerously cold. Yet Liam steps closer to the water’s edge.

  SOPHIA: Liam! I’m here.

  He whirls around. Sophia staggers out of the mist from the direction of Mrs. Popova’s, looking dazed.

  LIAM: What the—?

  He looks again toward the ocean, but there is only black water and white foam, and the mist, growing thicker with every breath.

  Of the girl who walked into the ocean, there is no sign at all.

  4

  I HEARD LIAM calling my name, but I was still rooted in place. It took me what felt like an eternity to start moving. Longer to get my voice back and call to him. He looked at me wildly, like it was impossible that I was standing there.

  Then he grabbed me in a tight hug, releasing me before I could decide how to respond. He cleared his throat, looking awkward. “Sorry. It’s just I saw—I thought I saw—”

  I didn’t get to hear what he was going to say. From farther along the beach came a crash and a scream. We exchanged a look that meant something like Now what?

  Liam sprinted toward the sound, awkward in his unlaced boots. I followed a beat behind. The sound had come from the end of a spit of rock, and as we drew closer a light stuttered near the water, accompanied by a string of frantic cursing.

  A small motorboat had slammed up against an outcropping of sharp black rocks about ten feet out from where we stood. Razor-sharp barnacles studded the slick rocks. The boat was taking on water rapidly, sinking, and a girl who looked about my age had flung herself up on the rock, scrambling for purchase, a heavy bag slung over her shoulder. Her foot slipped, and she plunged up to her waist in the water with a yelp.

  “Hang on,” Liam called to her.

  “What d’you think I’m trying to do?” she hollered back. Her voice sounded familiar. She braced and hauled herself upward again, but she was still submerged to her knees, and her hands were bloodied.

  Lily and Kenny came racing into view. “What’s going on?” Lily asked, and then she saw the girl. “Oh, shit.”

  The boat listed and slipped out of sight beneath the water. Beyond the girl, the water was deep, but between her and us I could see the shapes of rocks maybe a foot or two below the surface. Slippery, but better than plunging into ice-cold water. Hopefully.

  Automatically, I started to push aside my fear, but then I remembered how it had rushed back into me immediately, worse than before, how it had left me frozen. So I let it stay.

  “Liam, grab my hand,” I said, voice shaking but determined. I didn’t wait for anyone to object. I stepped out into the water. Liam lunged to grab me, getting his hand around my wrist to steady me as I balanced, my bare feet going instantly numb. I met the girl’s eyes. “You’re going to have to get closer,” I said.

  She began to inch around the rock. I stepped out as far as I could, Liam leaning to support me while Kenny grabbed his elbow to steady him. The girl reached toward me. Our hands met, her frigid, wet fingers closing over mine. “Got it?” I asked, teeth chattering.

  “I’m good,” she said tightly, hiking her bag up higher, and levered herself carefully off her perch, stepping onto one of the submerged rocks. She wobbled. I wobbled. But Liam steadied me, and none of us fell. We picked our way carefully to dry land. Liam let go of my hand as soon as we were safe, but I kept my grip on the girl until she straightened up, pale and shivering.

  “Thanks,” she said, giving me an odd look. I knew where I’d heard that voice before. Abigail Ryder. The girl who’d told me about my mother. I stared at her. And she—winked.

  “Who the hell are you?” Lily demanded. “What are you doing out here?”

  I didn’t want her answering that question. Or giving me away. “Maybe we can hold off on interrogating her until she’s inside and not hypothermic,” I suggested, putting the kind of steel behind the words that tended to make people hop into action without questioning. Kenny gave a little jerk and nodded, but Lily’s look was skeptical. Abby shivered theatrically.

  “G-good idea.” She might have been playing it up, but her lips were turning blue.

  Of the four of us, only Kenny had managed to grab a coat on his way out the door, and he hung it around Abby’s shoulders as we helped her toward the house. Mrs. Popova stood on the back porch, holding her rifle loosely.

  “She crashed on the rocks,” Kenny said. “We’ve gotta get her warmed up.”

  Mrs. Popova’s lips thinned. She looked out past us—at what, I couldn’t imagine.

  “S-sorry to impose,” Abby said, teeth chattering.

  For a wild moment, I thought Mrs. Popova was going to refuse. But then she stood aside. We trooped in and Kenny settled Abby on the couch before going to get the fire started. Mrs. Popova looked outside one last time, then closed the door and threw the deadbolt.

  I stood a few feet away from Abby as she stripped down to her underwear, the guys turning tactfully away, and wrapped herself in a heavy quilt. What was she doing here? No, that was the wrong question—I knew what she was doing here. She was chasing the same answers I was. But I didn’t know why, and that worried me.

  “Liam,” Mrs. Popova said, her voice clipped, “call your mother and tell her about our guest. And you.” She looked at Abby. “Who are you and what on earth are you doing out here?”

&
nbsp; “Abby. Abby Ryder. Nobody would take me, so I had to find my own way here,” Abby said. “I was trying to beat the storm, but I got a bit lost. With all the mist I didn’t even know I’d found the place until it busted a hole in my boat.”

  “You were trying to get here?” Kenny asked, mystified.

  Abby gave a sharp little laugh. “Assuming this is Bitter Rock, yeah.”

  “But why?” Kenny pressed.

  Abby’s eyes flicked to me for a split second. “I’m doing this school project. About mass disappearances. I was in Juneau visiting my aunt and I heard about the whole Landontown thing. I wanted to visit and check it out, and, well . . . I guess I got carried away?”

  She was lying. She’d called me about Bitter Rock months ago, and she hadn’t said anything about a school project then. She’d said she worked for a professor or something—Dr. Ashford. She said he investigated “this kind of phenomenon.”

  “So you’re one of those,” Mrs. Popova said, shaking her head with obvious disapproval. Abby had opened her bag and pulled out a wad of wet clothes, grimacing.

  “I’ll grab you something to borrow,” Lily said. “Put those by the fire to dry.”

  Liam was speaking quietly on the phone in the kitchen. He hung up and joined us. “Dr. Kapoor says to stay put. Bring her to the LARC in the morning,” he said.

  “For now, everyone should get some sleep,” Mrs. Popova said. “And get out of those wet clothes. Especially you, Ms. Hayes.”

  Abby’s eyebrow quirked at the surname. I looked down at my soaked jeans and bare feet, the latter of which were an unsettling shade of gray. “Right,” I said.

  “Where’s she going to sleep?” Lily asked, returning with the offered clothing.

  “She can bunk with me,” I said immediately. “I don’t mind.”

  “Sounds good to me. Sorry again. And thank you guys for saving my ass,” Abby said.

  “There will be a reckoning in the morning,” Mrs. Popova said, more a warning than a threat. Dr. Kapoor, I imagined, was not going to be pleased.

  And I could be sunk before I’d even gotten started.

  I pointed Abby toward the room and started to follow, Abby awkwardly carrying Lily’s borrowed clothes and her own bag while keeping the quilt wrapped around her. Liam grabbed my arm. “I know I’m not supposed to ask if you’re okay, so this is me not asking if you’re okay,” he said quietly.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” I asked. I didn’t ask it dismissively—I needed to hear the answer.

  He swallowed. “Something happened out there.”

  “You saw something?” I wanted the answer to be yes. Because that would mean it wasn’t just me, letting my imagination run wild.

  “There was someone out there,” he said. “And she looked . . .”

  “What?” I asked.

  His hand dropped from my arm. “I don’t know. The mist was really thick.”

  Disappointment and something deeper sang through me. For as long as I could remember, I’d been waiting for someone to tell me that they saw what I did. That I wasn’t alone. Or delusional. But anytime anyone came close, it ended like this. They saw something they couldn’t explain, and they ran as fast as they could in the other direction.

  At least, that was what it had been like when I was younger. Before everyone figured out what a freak I was and stayed away in the first place. Liam would figure it out too.

  “Good night,” I said, and told myself I was used to it. That I didn’t care what Liam Kapoor thought about me.

  * * *

  “Pardon my nudity,” Abby said once the door was closed, and dropped the quilt. I turned away while she shimmied into the sweats and long-sleeved tee that Lily had offered. Lily was shorter and stockier than Abby, and the sweats hit awkwardly above the ankle.

  As I stripped off my own sodden jeans, she unpacked the rest of her bag. There was a camera case and a notebook, along with a three-ring binder. The camera case was damp but the interior looked dry, and the notebook and binder were in plastic bags. She let out a sigh of relief.

  “Nothing vital lost,” she said. “So, Ms. Hayes. What brings you to Bitter Rock?” I glared at her, but she just smiled a little. “Sorry. I’m assuming you being here is my fault.”

  “Keep your voice down,” I hissed at her, but she was almost whispering already. I was just nervous. I perched on the bed opposite her. “What are you really doing here?”

  “The same thing you are, I’m guessing. Trying to find out why people keep disappearing from this place, and why no one else seems to care,” Abby said.

  “Why do you care?” I demanded, then shut up as I heard Kenny and Lily head down the hallway, chatting.

  Abby shrugged. “Curiosity, same as you.”

  I stared at her a beat, rage rising behind my breastbone. “Curiosity? I’ve spent my entire life wondering how my mother died. And it doesn’t make any sense. There’s no reason to hide the truth if all that happened was that she died in a storm. Why hide the fact that she was here? Who’s hiding it? What happened to her? What happened to me? I have to know, because until I do, I don’t even know who I am. I’ve got nothing. No family. No friends. I don’t even have a home to go back to. All I’ve got is myself, and I don’t know what ‘myself’ means if I don’t know why I lost everything else. So that’s why I care, Ms. Ryder. It’s not curiosity. It’s . . . everything.”

  I let out my breath in a rush and looked away, my eyes pricking. I resisted the urge to shove that emotion away, force it into the void. It always felt like the easier way out, in the moment. But some hurt was worth feeling.

  “Okay,” Abby said softly. “You’re right, that was flippant. I’m sorry. I came because of this.” She unzipped an inner pouch in her bag and pulled out a small cardboard box. She opened it carefully and emptied the contents onto her palm, holding it out to me.

  It was a wooden bird. A red-throated tern. Almost every detail was the same as the one in my jacket pocket: the red patch on its throat, the angle of its wings. But one wingtip had been broken off, and a brown stain marred its side.

  “It’s a red-throated tern. They only live here,” Abby said.

  “I know,” I said. “I . . . I’ve seen one like that. Where did you get it?”

  “My sister gave it to the man I work for, Dr. Ashford.”

  “And that made you want to come here?”

  “Yeah. See, the thing is, my sister gave it to him in September. When she’d been dead for almost a year.” I stared at her. She gave me a crooked smile. I didn’t believe in ghosts, exactly, but I was ready to accept them as part of a world that included me. “I’ve got no idea why Miranda sent me here. But you’re not the only one with personal business on this island, Sophia. Which means you’re not on your own.”

  I drew in a stuttering breath, relief that felt like sorrow sweeping through me. It seemed too dangerous to believe. I had always been alone. Always. “I need to find out what happened to her. To us,” I said.

  “I know. And I’ll help you,” Abby said. “I’ll tell you everything I know. But first, I need you to tell me something.”

  “What?” I asked, wariness stealing back into my tone.

  She tilted her head a little. “Why don’t you have a reflection?”

  EXHIBIT D

  Photograph from the Instagram account of user @missoulamont_anna

  POSTED MARCH 7, 2018

  Image shows a young woman with curly brown hair and a maroon coat standing in front of a pizza parlor, offering the camera a practiced smirk. To the right of the frame, captured unintentionally in the background, is a second girl, this one with a long plait of blonde hair hanging to the middle of her back. She is looking at her reflection in the mirrored windows of the restaurant.

  Except that it is not a reflection at all, or not a proper one. The girl in the mirror is also blo
nde, also with her hair braided, also with a gray coat and jeans.

  And like the girl who stands at the edge of the frame, the reflection is facing away from the camera.

  5

  ABBY LOOKED STRAIGHT at me. People didn’t often do that. Something about me didn’t invite direct scrutiny. But she’d seen. She’d seen what no one else had, my whole life.

  I don’t know when I first realized that I didn’t have a normal reflection—or rather, that other people did. That their reflections didn’t move out of synch, face the wrong way, get details wrong.

  “I have a reflection,” I said to Abby. Not because I thought I could fool her, but because I needed her to say it, the way I’d needed Liam to tell me what he’d seen. I needed to be sure. And so I waved at the window opposite us, and my reflection waved back.

  “Yeah, no,” Abby said. “That’s not a reflection. A reflection is a mirror image. You have a mole on your right cheek. Which means it should be on your reflection’s left cheek, but it isn’t. It’s on the right. Your jacket has a pocket on the left. So does the one in the reflection.”

  I gave a strangled laugh. “This is tame, for me. Sometimes she does what I do, only a second too late. Sometimes she’s wearing different clothes. Or her hair is all wild, even though I always keep mine braided. Or she’s looking the wrong way.”

  “Why?” Abby asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’d almost convinced myself it was all in my head.”

  “It isn’t,” Abby said. Her eyes were still locked on mine, and when she spoke, each word was deliberate and clear. “Sophia, I believe you. You never have to worry that I’m going to call you crazy or think you’re seeing things that aren’t there. You are not the strangest thing I’ve come across, I promise. Okay? I believe you.”

  I looked away, and bit my lip to try to hold back the tears that threatened to fall. I hadn’t realized how much I wanted to hear those words. How much I needed to, after all these years knowing there was something wrong with me. Instead, I’d only ever gotten frightened looks—or disgusted ones. Medication I found ways to throw away. And eventually, I’d gotten the same speech, over and over— We think you’d do better with a different placement.