The House at Island's End Ch. 08

IOANNA. Four months and ten days.

As if the whole island had blushed at everything that had happened over the past month, the fern-lined trails were trading their summer green for a new autumnal reddish hue. With the dense morning fog came a rain of pine needles, flooding the corners of the forest with a soft, cushioned layer like the season's first quilt spread over the beds in every room. The nights on Nela Island were colder now than in August, and though the drop in temperature had been slow to arrive, that week was proving unusually damp, given that it was already the middle of September. The weather, together with another month locked between its shores and cliffs, was taking a heavy toll on the spirits of all its inhabitants.

Half-naked on top of the mattress, Ioanna shifted position, bending her knees to warm up. Beside her, Luna, the girl who'd come from the mainland a month and a half ago, had stolen almost the whole sheet and was clinging to her as if her life depended on it. Face down, cheek pressed to the fabric, Luna breathed deeply in a calm sleep.

Ioanna had woken up about ten minutes earlier. The night with Luna had been, once again, a sexual whirlwind. Ever since Luna had finally agreed to spend the night in her cabin instead of the workers', the days had gone from less daring to more and more impassioned. At first, as was to be expected, Ioanna had deeply distrusted that girl's intentions. It was too good to be true. Pretty --very pretty--, funny, open, talented, and on top of that, bisexual. The longer Ioanna sat gazing, spellbound, at that girl's body, the less sense it made that in the middle of that island she'd found someone like Luna. Despite all her suspicions, the sex had been clearing away her doubts, and in that moment Ioanna almost didn't care what dark reasons Luna might have for sharing a bed with her.

Not knowing anything about Laura helped too. Since that last blowup, Laura had blocked her even on Instagram, so her ex's message was unmistakable: each of them should go her own way as best she could. "Zero regrets," Ioanna told herself in those moments when the remorse started creeping in. In fact, the last few days had been so intimate that it felt as if she'd always been with Luna and her life off the island were fading away like the morning fog.

Unable to sleep, Ioanna turned on the pillow and watched Luna breathing very close to her. Her fine blond hair fell in sensual waves over a face still a little puffy from sleep. Her bare breasts rested close together, firm and soft, moving with the rhythm of her distant breathing. If not for the sheet bunched around her legs, Ioanna would have gone back to examining with her usual lewd fascination the neck of the red guitar, tattooed in lavish detail from the thickest, lowest strings to the metal frets, covering the fleshiest parts of her thigh. Now hidden beneath the bluish bedsheet, the guitar's headstock peeked out in a far more sensual way.

Ioanna slid her hand slowly toward where Luna's bare shoulder gave way to the valley of her hip. There, the other tattoo, thorns wrapped around some kind of dragon, curled along the curves of her hips in deep greens before vanishing again beneath the sheet. Ioanna wanted to touch her, to hold her again and have more sex, but Luna, unlike her, had come to the island for work and deserved to rest. What time had they fallen asleep? It didn't matter. Neither her mother Mary nor Natalia needed Luna's services, so they'd both taken advantage and hidden away in her cabin the moment night began to fall --earlier than ever-- with no intention of leaving the bed except to use the bathroom. Meanwhile, lots of dance music --something she hated but Luna loved--, lots of tequila --which disgusted Luna, though she'd ended up accepting that Ioanna wouldn't drink anything else--, and above all, lots of skin against skin, lots of tongues shared in the most hidden places, and a heap of overlapping moans, one on top of another, until both of them ended in a stifled cry against the pillows.

Ioanna, in love with the way that girl was making her feel, swallowed hard in the morning stillness, and without realizing it she brought her index fingernail to her mouth to bite it in that reflex she'd had since she was little. Her mother had tried to stop it in a thousand ways: slapping her every time she caught her doing it, or sending her to bed without dinner when she'd bitten them so much she got blood on her school uniform. The moment she felt it between her teeth, Ioanna stopped dead. She'd made Luna a promise. Two weeks earlier, on one of their first nights of abandon, Luna had scolded her when she caught the gesture, and Ioanna, remembering her mother, had told her to take a hike. But Luna had pulled out her beauty cases, and almost half a bottle of tequila later, she'd ended up gluing her ragged nails to some slightly longer gel ones in a very black-and-silver shade. It wasn't something she felt especially proud of; even so, Luna thought those jet-black nails looked spectacularly sexy on her. And if they also served to make her finally drop that disgusting habit, she'd come out ahead no matter how you looked at it.

Ioanna toyed with the tip of the gel nail between her teeth, debating what to do. She had a terrible urge to bite it down to the quick. Then she thought of Luna's disappointment when she found out, and she clenched her fingers, hiding the nails in her fists. It wasn't as if Luna were forcing her into anything she didn't want, she told herself. She'd tried growing them longer a few times, though it never lasted long and didn't exactly thrill her. She was more the type to notice asses than hands, and fuck, Luna's was one of the roundest, lewdest asses she'd ever had the luck to cross paths with. So much so that whenever Luna walked through the forest, she always slowed down to watch how the weight of those cheeks beneath those low-rise jeans shifted from side to side the way logs drifted on the sea off the beach. To Ioanna, Luna was the only reason she hadn't yet told everyone to go fuck themselves, Uncle Max included.

Luna breathed deeper, moved her lips in her sleep, and scratched herself right where Ioanna was now carefully running her black nails. What time was it? Without making any sudden movement, she stretched out her arm and picked up her phone from the nightstand, where the last of the tequila sat in two shot glasses still slick with alcohol. Six fifteen in the morning. She couldn't have slept even three hours straight, she calculated, thinking back to the last time she'd looked at her phone the night before. They'd been without a connection for three days running now, and maybe out of habit, or because she no longer had to keep up a long-distance relationship, Ioanna was paying less and less attention to being cut off from the outside world.

After turning back toward Luna, Ioanna yawned several times, studying the narrow slit of the bedroom window, where sunlight was already beginning to seep in. Taking great care not to wake her, she slid slowly toward her side of the bed and lowered herself with a certain athletic grace, planting both feet on the small rug right where she landed. It was cold. The heaters hadn't been turned on yet, and she hadn't bothered learning how to use the fireplace, either. She soon felt the hair on her arms stand up as she stretched, shaking off sleep. The bedroom still smelled of the night's sex, and when she looked at herself in the bathroom mirror, the bags under her eyes showed all the hours she should have been sleeping. She smoothed down her lock of black hair a little and, in silence, spat into the sink drain, letting the spit trail down in a long, thin line. It had a metallic taste mixed with that other taste, Luna's own juices. When she finished spitting, she pushed the lock of hair off her face and tucked it behind her right ear.

"That's off-limits," she'd repeated to Luna two or three nights earlier in the main house, when the two of them ran into each other after Luna had gone to cut Tom's hair, that strange boy who seemed to be everywhere and nowhere at once.

"Well, your loss," Luna replied, moving her hands quickly around her face without touching it. "Because I'd thin it out here and give you a fade back here..."

Ioanna always smiled at her, letting her keep imagining it, only to tell her afterward not to dare touch it, not even with a finger.

"If there's one thing I'm really proud of, it's my hair. As far as I'm concerned, you can cut the whole goddamn island's hair if you want, but this lock right here, don't you dare touch it, you hear me?"

Ioanna got up from the toilet after a very yellow piss and chose not to flush, to keep quiet. Barefoot, she crossed the living room, weaving around a couple of chairs whose cushions lay on the floor, and went out the back door toward the path that connected to Natalia's cabin. It had been many mornings now since she'd last seen her go out walking toward the cliff. Since that night Richard nearly died under a beam, Natalia had changed as a person, sometimes subtly, but other times far more obviously. From Ioanna's point of view, Natalia had never been an especially social woman; however, for some time now that kind demeanor of hers had been disappearing almost completely, turning into something more... elaborate? Fake? Artificial? She wouldn't know how else to put it. At the communal dinners Natalia now talked more than she should, in a more relaxed tone, and, surprisingly, never shying away from any of the shallow topics her mother brought up, the kind Natalia had never before deigned even to listen to. Maybe it all came from the amount of wine she'd started drinking, Ioanna thought, puzzled, recalling how Natalia had even laughed at some of those tasteless jokes --and pretty sexist ones-- that her father told now and then. It seemed as if Richard's accident had been transforming her into someone different; not radically opposite --Natalia was still in there, in many a glance, especially when she'd sit staring off into infinity--, but it could be said that, to Ioanna, the Natalia of the last few weeks had started to feel like an almost total stranger.

Studying the end of the path, from where Natalia's cabin was barely visible, Ioanna breathed in the icy morning air and felt a chill. Inland, the first frosts had already begun, brought on by air currents that grew cooler and cooler as they came in from the beach side. Soon the first storms would start, and before she could blink, snow would blanket every corner of that island. But if Luna was there with her, if her whole life could be like the last few weeks, that damned island could stay that way forever. Not all the money in the inheritance could buy the sensuality with which she was savoring those moments.

With the echo of the beach gulls far off in the distance, Ioanna looked again at Natalia's cabin, wondering what it would be like to be suddenly left alone. After almost a month, Richard still wasn't responding. Luna had spoken with Gertrud, and the woman said that was normal. The sedatives from the first month were helping him get through the worst of the pain at the cost of side effects that hung over him like a perpetual gloom. It would still be many days before Richard could open his eyes, and more before he could speak. Ioanna knew that Natalia visited her husband at least once a day. She'd sit there for a while, silent, beside Richard's bed, without touching him, almost always gazing out the big window that faced the dock and thinking God only knew what. It was a rather pathetic picture, Ioanna told herself whenever she passed near the house and saw her there, pensive, behind the glass. And she wasn't the only one who thought something along those lines. Mary, her mother, tended to bring it up whenever Natalia came out of the room with a few dried tears in her eyes. "You see, Ioanna, how God gives you a little of the sweet and a little of the bitter? That's why, my child, you have to accept life as it comes. However sad you think it is, just remember it can always get worse."

Ioanna would answer with a dirty look.

"Jesus, Mom, how can you say things like that? Sure, it can get worse, but it can also get better, can't it? Why do you Christians always have to dwell on the misery? Just leave that woman alone, will you?"

The psychologists weren't working out the way Uncle Max --or those bastards at Wilkins & Wilkins-- had surely expected them to, either. While her mother was delighted --in the city there wasn't a month when she saw a psychologist fewer than four or five times--, her father had exhausted the patience of at least two of them. With the first, a middle-aged woman with a fairly good-natured disposition, Liam tried to hit on her three times in a row until she threatened to report him if he ever touched her again. The second, a very smiley man with a touch of flamboyance, must have heard Liam say something so foul and inhuman to him that the guy caught the first ferry off the island and never came back.

In her own experience, talking to a psychologist wasn't much different from talking to herself. It wasn't the first time, either. Ioanna had been through one or two in her life, always because of her mother, who, with the excuse that "you're not going because you're crazy, but so you don't end up crazy when you're older," had even tried to take her to conversion therapy in the hope that her daughter might, for once in her life, look at a boy as more than a friend. Be that as it may, Ioanna had learned to navigate all those psychological waters as if she were rowing around the park pond near her city home: keeping a steady rhythm, without tiring too much, and always letting the symptoms of that bottomless resentment she held toward her parents for locking her up on an island against her will mask her constant fear that that island was, in truth, nothing more than some rich man's twisted game.

"How are you doing, Ioanna?" Christina, the psychologist she and Natalia shared, would ask her every Tuesday morning.

"This isn't an island," she'd answer. "It's a prison with the sea for bars."

The psychologist always jotted down a lot whenever she described the island in terms of "a living hell," "the worst gift my parents could ever have given me," or her favorite, "if one day this island sank with all of us on it, nobody but Uncle Max would have cared, if that whole inheritance thing were even real." At the end of the session, the psychologist would write down another pile of things and, depending on the week, respond to her comments with a volley of optimistic phrases or with an awkward silence. And so the Tuesdays came and went, one after another, like the midafternoon rains or writing the four lines of the diaries.

At the cabin's back door, Ioanna shifted her weight from one foot to the other. She ought to go back inside and try to sleep a little more, she thought. But a strange noise, high-pitched and sustained, like the scrape of metal against rock, caught her attention. It had come from the path leading down to the beach. Frowning, she craned her neck and sharpened her hearing. Nothing. Only the sound of gulls far off and the sea pounding the cliff, mixed with the wind stirring the crowns of the conifers. On alert, she tried not to breathe, to make less noise. It had been something metallic. Of that there was no doubt.

Without thinking too much about it, she went back into the house, put on her black sweatsuit and tall hiking boots, and, closing the door slowly so as not to disturb Luna, walked up to the rise that overlooked the beach in the distance. Could it have been some tool from the construction site? The cabin where Richard had his accident would be over that way, and the last time she'd passed by, she'd seen that a shovel or pickaxe had been left lying around in the rush to get him out before the poor man bled to death. Still, the noise had sounded louder than a leftover shovel falling onto rock.

Cautiously, Ioanna headed down the dirt track that ran parallel to the hill, which rose higher and higher on her right. The sea was choppier than usual, and the foam that formed when it struck some of the big rocks gave off that salty dampness in every direction. Ioanna took another step forward, and then she remembered her first conversations with Luna.

"Do you really believe this island isn't what it seems?"

"It's not that I believe it. It's that it's true. There's no way we're locked up here for a year and nobody but Gertrud is keeping an eye on us. And even if that inheritance thing is real, would you let the five of us wander around here without putting up cameras?"

"And where do you think they've put them? I suppose I should have found them by now, right? I've been working here almost two months, and the only things I've noticed are what an asshole your father is, how sad your mother always looks, that this Natalia isn't someone you can trust too much, and that you're the sexiest person within a hundred kilometers."

"Only a hundred?"

"Don't get carried away, gorgeous. I'm sure there are girls like you by the dozen in the city."

Ioanna leaned against the trunk of a very thick pine to look out beyond the bend that opened onto the beach. Her ears were sharper than her eyes, and even so, all she could hear was the morning breeze, the gulls' cries ringing out like bells, and the sea coming and going around the island with that tireless rhythm.

She walked on a few more meters, wondering what it would be like if all of this really was about the inheritance in the end. If, when she left there, her family had all those millions, and on top of that, if she and Luna were still together. What would her life be like at the end of that year? Without Laura, all that NGO work seemed less interesting. It was clear she'd keep helping at many other organizations; even so, the prospect of running into her ex at some event or in the offices of some NGO put her off completely.

A conversation in the distance caught her attention. With no idea where to hide, Ioanna ran behind the first clump of reddish ferns she found, snagging her sweatpants and jacket sleeves on every little branch. If she'd done it on purpose, she couldn't have made more noise.

"I told you to be careful with the rock, goddammit," said a man's voice, just around the bend.

"You think it's easy steering the fucking boat through the middle of the reef without turning on the motor? Christ, next time you take the wheel. And keep your voice down, goddammit, or they're going to find us," another voice answered, a woman's.

"Where's the goddamn cave? Because I don't see any cave anywhere."

"There, it has to be around there. Near the big rock, behind the tangle of vines."

"Fuck me, we look like a couple of fucking pirates. The tide won't rise while we're inside, will it?"

"You've watched too many movies."

"Whatever you say, but I don't want to drown."

Hidden behind the dense fern branches, Ioanna frowned. What was going on over there? Who were those voices, and what cave were they talking about? With far more curiosity than fear, she craned her neck but couldn't see anything. She'd have to move at least as far as the bend that led down to the beach. But if those two were prowling nearby, they'd spot her. Shit, she told herself, searching for a plan. After a moment, she thought up an alternative route. She could go down the little path to her left, circle the stream, and approach from behind. Or she could head back to the cabin, wake Luna, and tell her there were a couple of very suspicious people over there.

Her internal debate lasted exactly as long as it took her to set one foot on the path. If Luna was in cahoots with them, that would be the worst thing she could do. And if she wasn't, it could be too dangerous for her. Even at the risk of being discovered, she jumped over the ferns, went down the narrow path, and, crawling through the gully that opened onto the beach, reached the edge where the vegetation gave way to sand. She couldn't get any closer without being seen.

The metal boat gleamed in the sun, floating just a couple of meters from the shore. It was white and long, with a bluish motor on one end that reminded her of a small motorcycle's engine. Footprints in the sand revealed the path those two must have taken. From her hiding spot, Ioanna could only follow the tracks to an inlet that seemed to vanish among several rocks and a pile of ferns. She stayed there, in silence, for a few minutes, until she understood that whoever had arrived in that boat must already be inside the cave.

Determined to find out what the hell was going on, her heart racing again, she ran along the beach, hugging the underbrush as closely as she could. Then she braced herself against one of the rocks of the small cliff and kept going, flat against the surface like a gecko, up to the opening. It sounded as if someone were striking objects inside that crevice. A seagull crossed the sky, swooped down screeching almost to her head, and then took flight again on a gust of air.

"Are you coming to the market tomorrow?" she heard from the darkness. It was the man.

"Damn it, I've told you a thousand times I have to take the videos to the hotel. Have you found that fucking box yet? I can't see shit. We should've brought the flashlights. I told you, for crying out loud."

"They really said a box? There's a ton of barrels here. Are you sure it's not inside one of these barrels?"

"No, I'm telling you. They said it'd be in a brass box. Dig around, because it has to be here."

"The market's all day. We could go after the hotel. You know we always find interesting things to take back with us."

"I refuse to go back like we're in the middle of a fucking move. What they're going to pay us for these videos is worth more than that whole damn market. So tomorrow, as soon as we hand this over, we take the money and head back."

"But..."

"No, I said. Besides, I don't want to set foot in that asshole's shop again. It's always the same. He's constantly messing with you, and that can't go on. One of these days, when he least expects it, I'll slap him. Or worse."

"And what if we don't find the box?"

"Of course we're going to find it. Did you look behind that board?"

Silence. More silence. And a few thuds. Ioanna, in her mind, was piecing together everything she heard. Videos. A box. Someone from the island must have left them something, a flash drive or a memory card in a box, and once they fetched it, those two would carry it to a hotel to exchange it for money. Smiling with satisfaction, but also with an angry look, Ioanna felt like turning around and running to her parents' cabin to throw it in their faces that all this time, ever since they'd arrived, she'd been right. Someone was recording them, and that whole island was nothing but a goddamn lie.

"Can't you call her? There's no trace of the fucking box here. Are you sure it was this cave?"

"Are you an idiot? Of course it's this cave."

"Well, the box isn't here."

"It has to be."

"How do you know?"

"Because people aren't as stupid as you. When plans are made, they're followed through."

"But what if they found it? Or what if she couldn't bring it?"

"Will you shut up and keep looking, for the love of God? You're getting on my nerves."

Dying of curiosity to know the identity of those two, Ioanna peeked out through the crevice. It was dark. Very dark. Suddenly a light switched on, illuminating the small cave. How had she never noticed that opening before? She'd passed by there at least a thousand times over all those months.

Sure enough, they were a couple. They looked about thirty and wore cutoff jeans. She had her hair pulled back tight, and it was lighter in color; he, by contrast, wore his very long, with a thick black beard. Ioanna could only see them when the beams of their flashlights crossed each other.

"How can there be no signal on this fucking island?" the guy asked, phone in hand, searching for a signal by raising his hand toward the cave ceiling.

"Do you ever listen when people talk? Why do you think they'd send us for a bunch of fucking videos in a fucking box if they could've sent them over the fucking internet?"

The guy pursed his lips, annoyed.

"Well, I don't see any box with any flash drive here," he said again. "Maybe a crab took it."

"If you say something that stupid again, I swear I'll drown you at the shore."

Ioanna's mind was a storm of conspiracies. What videos were these? Where were the cameras? Why would they want them? Who was supposed to have left them in that box?

A handful of dirt fell from the cliff above the crevice, bouncing off the vertical wall and hitting her on the head. Ioanna, right beneath it, looked up, badly frightened, and made out a silhouette. Nervous, she calculated her chances of escaping to her right, toward the forest, but if someone was already on the ledge about to come down, she'd be exposed. To the left, even worse. The beach fanned out and it would take her too long to reach the ferns.

"Fuck..." she said to herself, thinking what an idiot she'd been. Without thinking twice, she slipped into the crevice and, sheltered by the shadows --or so she wanted to believe--, wound her way through the darker interior of the cave, moving as far as possible from those two. Just as the guy switched on his phone's flashlight to illuminate where they'd heard Ioanna's noises, she managed to hide behind what looked like some old wooden boxes. She lay down and pressed her body against the sand.

"What was that?" the guy asked, nervous.

"The crab that stole our videos, you fucking idiot," the girl answered. "Who the hell else would it be? Nobody knows about this cave."

Ioanna wished she were exactly that, a crab able to dig a hole in seconds and hide under the rocks. She kept her head down and her body frozen as long as she could. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she discovered the cave was bigger than she'd imagined. There was a pile of half-broken boxes, iron bars, and even tables scattered across that open space. Toward the back it narrowed somewhat. Was that an iron gate? It opened onto a long corridor, like a tunnel that vanished into infinity.

"Hey, what if we ask around and see if anyone else wants these videos?" the guy asked, shifting some planks.

"I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that," the girl answered with contempt, kicking a wooden box away from her feet; it flew off and crashed into an empty drum.

"I'm just saying, whenever someone wants something, there's always someone else willing to pay more."

"And there's also always someone willing to blow our brains out if we don't hand it over. You want to end up like your cousin or what? Look over there, by those boxes."

The guy seemed to shut his mouth immediately.

"I'm just saying, if..."

"Shut up. Shut the hell up. I think I heard something."

Ioanna turned her head slightly, watching the silhouette backlit by the opening of the crevice. The passing gulls created other, far more elusive silhouettes behind her. For a few steps, the figure walked somewhat hesitantly, until the light from the girl's phone lit up their face, forcing whoever it was to cover their eyes with their hands.

"Who the hell are you?" the guy asked, very nervous.

When the person lowered her arms, Ioanna discovered it was Paloma, her mother's kitchen assistant and right-hand woman. She wore that same evasive look as always, and now she seemed quite overwhelmed. She was dressed in the same work outfit, a gray shirt and long khaki pants. Her hair, cut somewhat short, fell in small layers on either side of her plump face. Without saying a word, Paloma reached into her left pocket and offered something very small to the woman, who took it as if she were stealing treasure.

"Christ, why didn't you warn us?" the girl asked, angry.

Paloma shook her head.

"The room was occupied. I hurried as much as I could."

"Son of a bitch, what a mess, we weren't supposed to see each other's faces," the guy said. "Did you see our faces?" he asked Paloma, now very close to her.

Paloma, frightened, took a step toward the crevice exit.

"No."

"You sure?" the guy asked again, now with a louder voice and a much more threatening tone.

Paloma shook her head again, this time turning her neck toward the outside.

"Hey, it's fine, relax," the girl said, trying to ease the tension. "What's done is done. Now go back to the house and don't talk to anyone about this. You hear me? We get in the boat and nothing happened here."

Paloma nodded several times. Then she blinked, creasing her forehead a little. Ioanna, horrified, felt her blood run cold. Was Paloma looking at her? The worker also opened her eyes wide and raised her hand, pointing right at where Ioanna was.

"Shit," she said to herself, sensing she'd been discovered.

In a single leap, Ioanna stood up, and the couple's two phone flashlights pointed at her like rifles. Ioanna didn't know what to do.

"And who the hell are you supposed to be?" the woman asked.

"What's going on, is the whole fucking island going to be in this cave now?" he asked, ready to run at Ioanna.

Ioanna reacted fast. She tried to move toward the crevice, but the guy had stepped into the middle and she had to stop short.

"She's the Allens' daughter," Paloma remarked.

"She's one of them?" the girl asked.

"Holy shit," the guy exclaimed.

Without warning, Ioanna broke into a run, but instead of heading for the crevice, she went for that metal door that seemed to be half open. The couple set off a second later.

With one shove, the door gave way, bounced against the wall once Ioanna crossed the threshold, and on swinging back, caught on the iron bars of the frame. Ioanna looked back and saw the couple struggling uselessly against the gate while they yelled at each other.

Without slowing down, Ioanna found herself inside a narrow tunnel, though wide enough to move through quickly without brushing her shoulders. When the scant light from the crevice and the couple's flashlights faded away, she switched on her phone's light and kept running as fast as she could, every so often leaping over rocks and planks. Where the hell was she going? she asked herself, hearing that the couple must have managed to open the gate and were now running after her.

"Run, for God's sake, she saw our faces!" she heard from far away.

Ioanna flew through the tunnel faster than she'd ever run in her life, mastering her fear of suddenly hitting a wall, or worse, a precipice. For a few minutes that felt like centuries, she rounded every corner, dodging mounds that time had been crumbling away.

"Hey! We just want to talk!" the guy shouted from far off. And yet he sounded closer and closer.

Ioanna's legs began to tire. A few meters on, she had to stop. There was a fork. Which way was which? Which should she choose? It took her a second to decide that left was the best option. Before taking that path, she pulled off one of her shoes and threw it near the start of the right-hand path, hoping to confuse the couple. Then she took off like the devil himself was chasing her.

A few hundred meters later, with her phone's light half covered by her hand, she tried to walk as fast as she could without making too much noise. Had they taken the bait? she said to herself, trying not to gasp from the effort. The tunnel was damper than before, and she could see how the tree roots had grown until some of them hung along the edges of the tunnel. Who had dug this, and for what purpose?

Disoriented, Ioanna kept walking through the gloom as fast as her bare foot allowed. She was terrified. What would they do when they reached her? Nobody knew she was there. Luna would wake up very late, and finding herself alone, she'd go to the main house to prepare her mother's beauty treatment. The rest, Natalia included, would assume she was wandering around lost, as she always had. How long would it be before they found her there, dead, after that couple murdered her? If nobody knew about the cave, decades could pass before anyone came across her body.

Shivering from fear, cold, and darkness, Ioanna crossed half the island through that half-ruined tunnel until she nearly collided with a stone staircase that climbed steeply up to nowhere. Ioanna hesitated a second before going up the steps, trying not to cough. The effort had been tremendous, and she was starting to feel truly dizzy. Besides, she must have stepped on something sharp, because her foot felt much wetter than the other, as if it were bleeding.

The staircase was quite steep and really long. Every couple of steps she looked back in terror. And she went on like that for a few minutes. As she neared the top, she discovered some light coming through a few holes. There was a way out. Relieved and largely hopeful, she sped up, climbing the small, worn steps two at a time until she rested her hands on what looked like a rather battered wooden wall speckled with holes of different sizes. She peered through the gaps between the planks. That wasn't an exit to the outside. On the other side, there seemed to be a room. A very well-built one. Fuck, was it in the main house? Yes. It reminded her of the room on the right, the one that opened onto the main living room. The very one where her father spent so much time watching that huge television. Her heart still racing and her whole face drenched in sweat, she looked for a way through the wall, but there were only tiny holes. At some point, someone had walled off that entrance by placing a bookshelf in the middle, she told herself, wondering where it would be in relation to the living room.

Ioanna looked back over her shoulder very carefully again. Without light to illuminate it, the staircase seemed to descend into the darkest, quietest hell. Luckily, she told herself, the couple's absence meant they must have taken the other path to wherever it led.

Feeling along the wall, she found an opening in the wallpaper big enough to slip her hand through and enlarge by tearing the paper. She took out her phone and switched on the light again. Now she could see it better. The bookshelf had no back. A few books, a few cups, and decorative plates rested on the shelves. And beyond it, her father's room opened up. Ioanna struck one of the planks, and a pile of dust and dry branches fell on her. The tunnel seemed ready to collapse. She coughed with her hand over her mouth as she looked again toward the bottom of the staircase. She was still alone.

When she peered through the planks again, her eyes went wide. Was that her father lying there on the sofa? He was asleep on his back, surrounded by a few beer cans. Without a doubt, her father must have spent the night there.

"Dad!" she whispered between the boards. "Dad, wake up!"

Nothing. Shit. There was no way her father could hear her unless she shouted. Ioanna raised her hand and struck the wall again. Another pile of sand and dust came down on her. But if she couldn't get her father to wake up, who knew what they'd do to her once those two realized they'd taken the other path.

Thinking fast, Ioanna crouched and grabbed one of the last big stones that had fallen from the ceiling. She raised her hand to hit the wall, but her arm didn't reach where she wanted. The couple was there. Less than fifteen steps from her. Both of them, filthy and looking as exhausted as she did, raised their hands in a gesture of peace.

"Hey, easy, we just want to talk," the woman said.

Ioanna, stone in hand, told them to stay back. But they kept advancing.

Seized by terror, Ioanna began pounding the wall with all her might and screaming at the top of her lungs. The couple sped up. They reached her just as another rockslide fell onto the staircase, tearing away half of the right wall. In the middle of the haze kicked up by the collapse, Ioanna managed to twist free of the guy's hands, and as she raised the stone to defend herself, she seemed to strike the girl with it. The woman stumbled, and though she tried to grab Ioanna's arm, she slipped on the sweat-slicked steps and fell down the stairs. The guy, his face black with dirt and his eyes bulging, watched for a few seconds as his partner disappeared down the staircase. Then he turned, and from the look on his face, Ioanna knew she was going to die.

When the guy grabbed Ioanna by the neck, the whole wall seemed to come down. An arm appeared out of nowhere and pulled Ioanna out of the tunnel, then grabbed the guy by the shirt and, with a shove, dragged him into the room.

Her father had a golf club in his hand, and he unleashed all his strength on that guy's head, sending him flying, spinning like a top. Beside him, Gertrud and Roberto, visibly frightened, weren't quite sure how to react. Part of the room's wall had broken away, taking the bookshelf with it and leaving a couple of the staircase steps showing through the black gap.

Liam ran to embrace his daughter, half lying on the room's carpet.

"Ioanna? Are you okay? What the hell happened?"

She began to cry, clinging to her father.

Gertrud murmured an order to Roberto. The night watchman disappeared for a second and came back with what looked like a shotgun. The guy Liam had struck was still lying face down, a small pool of blood seeping from his head and staining, along with his black hair, part of the floor where the carpet ended.

"The woman..." Ioanna murmured between sobs, motioning with her eyes toward the hole in the wall, "there was a woman... and Paloma... we were in a cave on the beach, then I went into the tunnel..."

While Ioanna sobbed, trying to explain what had happened, Roberto switched on a huge flashlight and pointed it toward the bottom of the staircase. Gertrud leaned out too.

"I'm going to call the authorities. Don't go down. And don't touch that other one."

Liam held his daughter tight against his chest and looked up at Roberto.

"If he moves, put a fucking bullet in him, you hear me?"

Roberto nodded, raising the shotgun barrel toward the guy's body.

"Dad... I was right... they're watching us. There are cameras. And videos."

Liam had no idea what his daughter was telling him. Without taking his eyes off the kid's body, he straightened up to pick the golf club off the floor. Then he examined the guy more closely. He didn't seem to be breathing.

"Fuck," Liam muttered, glancing toward his daughter, who was still crying with her hands over her face.

A second later, Gertrud crossed the room with a determined stride.

"Roberto, go down and see if that woman is still alive. You, Mr. Liam, give me the club and take your daughter out of here. I don't want any of you coming back to the main house until we ask you to, do you hear me? It's very important that you don't come back while the police are here."

Liam nodded, helping Ioanna to her feet. As he passed near Gertrud, the woman took the golf club from his hands with a decisive gesture.

"I don't think he's breathing," Liam remarked.

"Leave it to us. You two go to the cabin with Tom."

The scrawny kid had appeared there in silence and waited with his hands clasped, not taking his eyes off anything.

"Tom, what are you doing standing there like a dummy? Bring the cart to take the Allens to their cabin. Come on!"

The boy moved quickly and disappeared back the way he'd come in.

"Paloma..." Ioanna said, with some branches and stones still in her hair and her face quite dirty. "She was in the cave. She'd arranged to meet those two."

Gertrud nodded gravely. Then she looked at Liam.

"Give her some sedatives and have her take a shower before bed. If we haven't called you in a few hours, stay there. You haven't seen anything. The police will believe Roberto and Tom subdued them, and there'll be nothing more to discuss."

Footsteps on the staircase forced them to look toward the hole. Roberto came back out with the flashlight and the shotgun.

"She's dead. She must have broken her neck in the fall."

Gertrud put on that look of firmness again, as if she had everything under control despite clearly improvising.

"Better. Fewer explanations. Look, Tom is here. We'll let you know. Are you all right, Miss Ioanna? Are you hurt?"

"I know you're recording us," Ioanna answered, now with a bit more composure than a moment earlier.

Liam looked to Gertrud, curious.

"She must have hit her head on a rock," the woman explained. "And I think she has a small wound on her foot. Tom, bring bandages and some rubbing alcohol. If she needs stitches, we'll wait until the police leave."

Liam was still waiting for some further explanation. Gertrud lowered her voice.

"Mr. Allen, this island was used for decades to smuggle alcohol and other substances. It's not the first time we've found some of these scoundrels on our shores. They surely have a boat on the beach and some drugs in one of those caves. Roberto, wake Mike and go there. The police will arrive in an hour at the earliest. Make sure none of this can stain the reputation of the Allen family, understood? Take a walkie-talkie and keep me informed."

Roberto nodded again, sternly.

The tunnel's dust stained the light that broke through the big windows of the main house's room. The boy's body, motionless among some of the plates and cups from the bookshelf, formed a macabre silhouette on the wooden floor. Far beyond, on the coast, the fog was lifting to make way for an unusually beautiful autumn day on Nela Island.

Ioanna, very dizzy, cast a quick glance at the black hole, wishing she had the strength to go down the stairs to that woman's body and take whatever it was that Paloma had handed over to the woman. But it was impossible. Her right foot felt numb, and she was too winded even to take a single step. With her father beside her, Ioanna left the living room, studying every corner of the ceiling. It was no longer a supposition. It was a fact: there were surveillance cameras there. And she couldn't picture the moment when she'd explain it to Luna, because neither her parents, nor Gertrud, nor those bastards at Wilkins & Wilkins --much less Uncle Max-- were going to make her unmask whoever the hell was behind all of it.

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Author's note:

We're nearing the halfway point of the year, and events are starting to pile up. For now, the plan is still holding, and barring surprises, from here on everything will speed up. Many thanks to those of you still strolling around the island. We'll read each other in the next chapter.