The House at Island's End Ch. 11

IOANNA. December 18 -- seven months and seventeen days.

The glove was frozen completely solid. As stiff as a goddamn corpse. Worse, it belonged to the only pair I had left in the drawer. Way to go, Ioanna, I told myself, cursing under my breath. It was the second time I'd left them on the porch table before heading to bed. Angry at myself, I gave it two sharp raps against the wood, hoping the ice stuck to the glove would crack, but no -- it was like hitting the table with an iron bar. Feeling the cold creeping into my chest, I zipped my coat up as high as it would go and shoved my bare hands into my pockets to at least warm my fingertips. The little warmth my body produced escaped through my mouth in a cloud of breath, and I couldn't stop thinking that anyone who stayed on this goddamn island all winter would suffer a hell of a lot more than they would back in the city.

I stood at the edge of the wooden porch, about to step down onto the icy path that split that thick, clean blanket of snow in two, and stared anxiously at the walkie-talkie on the table. It was a small, narrow device with a green display on the front and an enormous number of tiny buttons. I'd lost count of how many times I'd checked it over the last five days. Where the fuck were you, Luna? I asked myself. Everything was going far worse than either of us had planned. First, some problem aboard the cargo ship Robin was on near Portland had left him stranded for almost a week until they fixed the engine. Then Luna lost contact with him for several more days, and by the time the guy resurfaced, storms had been rolling through our area one after another, making it impossible to get near the island. Unfortunately, now it was Luna who also seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth after leaving on the ferry five days earlier. It was as if the whole universe were conspiring to keep me from getting off this fucking island. But they weren't going to beat me; I was dead sure of that.

Worried because I hadn't heard from Luna, I struck the porch railing with the frozen glove again. The snow-covered forest answered only with the echo of ice against wood. I was sure I'd set the walkie-talkie correctly. Channel seven, that's what Luna and I had agreed on when she'd taken one from Mike's crew. In fact, we'd tested them together as Luna was leaving the island on the return ferry. We'd roughly calculated that those gadgets had a range of about three miles from shore, but on clear days like that one, they might reach four. Based on the ferry's usual travel time, everyone figured we were about twenty miles from the nearest port. So unless Luna got close enough in Robin's boat, all I would hear from that devilish device in my hands was silence and the occasional stray burst of interference.

"Ioanna to Luna, do you copy? Over. Ioanna to Luna," I repeated, pressing the button without much hope. Then I waited. And then I waited a while longer, just as I had every day before.

Tired of listening to the walkie-talkie, and with the storms briefly letting up, I figured the time had come to lay out a plan that would let me spend the night in one of the upstairs rooms of the main house. If Luna decided to set out to sea, this would be the best day for it. Craning my neck, I looked north across the island. Given the height of the hill the house sat on, maybe I could gain another three or four miles of range. I'd go up for dinner to keep Richard company, then watch a movie with my father until he fell asleep on the couch, and afterward, claiming it was too cold for me to walk back outside, I'd ask Gertrud to get one of the empty upstairs bedrooms with a terrace ready for me.

After sorting out my plans for the night, I started imagining what Luna might be doing on the mainland. She would have met up with Robin, and together they would have decided when to come get me. Right now they'd be over there waiting, cooped up like I was, until it was time to board the boat. But what if the guy had backed out? I didn't know anything about that Robin beyond what Luna had told me a few weeks back. She'd only mentioned that they knew each other from some earlier jobs and that they'd slept together a couple of times. Was he a guy you could trust? With the walkie-talkie in my hand, I thought that if Luna hadn't been able to get the boat to take me out of there, she'd have managed to get a message to me through one of the workers, or she'd be planning to return on the first available ferry and go back to work as if it were the most natural thing in the world. But five days had passed since then. Why hadn't I heard anything from her?

Shit, I whispered, giving the railing another whack with my frozen glove to let out my frustration. Then I pursed my lips, scanning the horizon of the sea. Where the fuck have you gone, Luna?

Tired of waiting, I walked all the way down to the beach, trying not to break my neck on the sheets of ice beneath the snow. Beyond the damp-flecked branches, the cave was still there. I went in slowly, hoping its walls would shelter me from the damp cold of the sea while my eyes adjusted to the darkness. Then I grabbed the travel bag I'd stashed between some old drums for my escape. I couldn't help shooting a quick, almost fearful glance at the iron gate at the back, the one I'd fled through for my life a few weeks earlier, and I felt a chill again, this time not from the cold. The gate was still completely boarded shut with crossed planks that Mike and the crew had put up a few days later. With a shudder, I turned my attention back to the bag of clothes, opened it, and made sure everything was still dry. There wasn't much: a few T-shirts, panties, a sweater, and my passport, just enough to get by for the first few days until I reached Canada.

Through the gap I could see that although the day had started out an almost ice-blue, the sea had darkened as the morning wore on because of the black clouds the wind was driving in. Gertrud's forecast said the storm would pass by without hitting us, but other times that woman's forecast might as well have come from sticking a finger in the air and taking a guess. Beside me, the few gulls that stayed through the winter seemed to be squawking unusually loudly, and I turned my head looking for a sign. Nothing. Just sand, waves, and the feeling that the island was drifting, going from one storm to the next. I stood there scanning the horizon for a good while, listening to the sound of the sea bouncing off the cave walls. And I kept at it until I told myself the smartest thing would be to go back to the main house. At least I could ask Gertrud for another new pair of gloves to have on hand in case Luna showed up tonight.

At the first crossroads I ran into Mike. He and Caleb were getting the portable snowblower ready on a bare patch of earth surrounded by snow. They were having a quiet discussion about one of the engine's cranks. I greeted them without stopping, and they did the same. A few yards later, right at the turnoff to my parents' cabin, I spotted Natalia. She was hurrying back from the main house with a stuffed backpack in one hand.

I know all too well the dark places a person's mind can go in the loneliness of that island. Especially after her husband's accident and the terrible decision she'd made for both of them to stay trapped here all winter. Even so, I couldn't quite understand that self-destructive spiral she seemed to have fallen into lately. Dressed entirely in brilliant white, in a bulky down parka and equally white, skintight leggings, Natalia walked with a confident stride in a pair of brown UGG boots, the kind that years ago had come into fashion among the rich and had only grown more expensive with every passing winter. Her foundation seemed to get thicker by the day, and she was probably missing having Luna do her hair. Natalia looked up as I passed her and greeted me with a nod. She looked tired and far from her best.

Though when I arrived on the island last summer I'd thought Natalia might be the only person I could trust, I soon realized there was something unresolved deep inside that woman. Would Natalia have changed at all if that beam hadn't fallen on her husband? I was almost sure that someone who'd changed as quickly as Natalia had was only waiting for an excuse -- any excuse -- to do it. And the open secret of what was going on in her cabin? Shit, I get why nobody wanted to tell Richard, and that poor man, still confined to his room in the main house, wasn't even aware of what his wife got up to when he wasn't around, but it was only a matter of time before he found out about Natalia's affairs. I'm convinced my mother knew about her thing with Matteo, I thought. I'd seen my mother watching them plenty of times, and fuck, it wasn't like Natalia had bothered to hide it lately. The night of December thirteenth into the early hours of the fourteenth, when I'd gone down to the cave to leave some towels in my backpack, was the night of the Geminids. How the hell could I have forgotten that date? The clouds parted, and the moon was dim enough to give us a few clear hours to watch that shower of shooting stars. I had to admit this fucking island could sometimes give me goosebumps. The water vapor, that mist that formed when the cold air touched the warmer water -- as Mike explained to me later -- formed a kind of low fog over the sea. Above it, in that pitch-black sky free of the city's light pollution, it looked as if a waterfall of shooting stars was trying to build a staircase to escape up to the Milky Way. Since I was a little girl, when I still idolized my parents, the three of us would go out at night to watch the Geminids while I imagined they were spaceships coming to invite us to travel beyond our planet. In the cave, with only my impatience to see Luna again for company, I felt time on the island slow to a complete stop. And once again, prey to anxiety, I thought that if I spent much more time trapped within its shores, I'd never be able to recover all the time I'd lost. I had to get out of there by any means.

I think that night of the Geminids was the first time -- and, of course, not the last -- I saw Natalia cheat on her husband. On my way back from the beach, I passed that empty cabin half hidden along the north trail. I heard her unmistakable moans and, as I got closer, I could see her, half naked, stretched out on a thick fur blanket, riding the cook's body with intensity. Maybe because I wasn't expecting it, or because I couldn't believe Natalia was doing that out in the open in the middle of the night, I spent more time than I should have watching Natalia press her hands into the blanket and move back and forth, up and down, in a heavy, deliberate rhythm, letting her white hair flow down her back like a waterfall of ice. Contrary to what I'd always thought of her, it was Natalia who seemed to call the shots. And she did it with considerable authority and an undercurrent of violence, as if overt dominance were part of who she really was. Natalia said when to stop, when to keep going, and which position they would try next. I'd never have thought that Natalia, so sweet, so empathetic, and sometimes so quiet, would be the kind of woman who wielded in bed all the authority she seemed not to hold in her real life.

What disturbed me was realizing that over those last months Natalia had been working out more than usual and carefully sculpting her body. I wasn't too proud of having stood there staring at her breasts, more perfect by the day, or her hips, so narrow, while she had her way with Matteo from every angle, but fair was fair: Natalia was becoming a really attractive woman with an almost aggressively provocative sensuality. And she -- I was convinced of it too -- wasn't just aware of it but also played it up with her clothes and her increasingly suggestive behavior. Either way, and although I hadn't been there to catch every time Natalia had been unfaithful to Richard, I was already running out of fingers on one hand counting the nights she'd slept alone over the past month.

Wearing that serious, determined expression of hers, Natalia gave a slight nod when she noticed me. I did the same. Where had she been so early, and why was she in such a hurry? To my surprise, she stopped beside me and put a hand on my arm. I could tell she was about to ask me something. Her eyes were still ringed in heavy black shadow, and her lips, coated in ever more black lipstick, moved quickly as she spoke in a near whisper, as if what she was about to say could be considered a secret.

"Hey, Ioanna, you wouldn't happen to have any weed, would you?" she asked, staring right at me.

I frowned, backing slightly away from a frozen puddle. Was she seriously asking me if I had marijuana?

"Weed?" I replied, taken aback.

"Come on, don't play dumb. I've seen you and Luna sneaking off to smoke at night."

I hesitated for a second, wondering how to answer. I didn't smoke. It was Luna who occasionally rolled a joint at night before bed.

"Sorry, it was all Luna's," I said, lowering my voice too, even though no one was on that path but Natalia, me, and some lost squirrel.

Natalia seemed quite disappointed.

"And when's Luna coming back? I haven't seen her in days."

I'd like to know that myself, I thought.

"I don't know. She left because her mother was sick. She should be back on one of the first ferries. Maybe even today."

Natalia then moved a little closer.

"Would you mind talking to her?"

I held up my phone, as if it were obvious I had no way to reach her. She pursed her dark lips.

"I know we can't call the mainland. I meant when she gets back. Would you mind asking her for some? I'm sure she can give it to one of Mike's guys and they can bring it to me."

Astonished that I was having that conversation with Natalia, I nodded slightly to get myself out of there as soon as possible.

"Sure."

"Tell her I can pay her with whatever she needs. Anything."

Despite the makeup, Natalia's dark circles were obvious. Her face looked harder, more drawn. Maybe the cigarettes were already taking their toll on that woman's skin, but suddenly it seemed to me as if I were talking to her older sister and not the Natalia I'd always known. There was something too dark and unsettling in the way she smiled.

"You will?" she asked again, more insistently. Her breath shot from her mouth like a geyser. With Natalia's now-familiar scent of mint and cigarettes hanging around her, I said yes again.

"Yeah, sure, but I can't promise you anything. Luna doesn't deal drugs," I said, and I sounded more defensive than I'd intended.

"Everyone has a price, Ioanna. Tell me what she wants, okay?" Natalia said just before starting off toward her cabin again. Then she stopped a few yards away. "And while you're at it, ask her what else she can get."

"What else like what?" I asked.

"Don't be an idiot, Ioanna."

Natalia turned around without waiting for an answer and kept walking toward her cabin. I stood there a while, completely thrown by that last comment. What the hell was wrong with everyone?

In the main house, life seemed to settle into its usual, inescapable routine. Richard was trying to beat his own personal distance records, leaning on that cheerful Italian girl. Tom had started the winter pipe maintenance, and I saw my parents arguing through the glass during one of their morning walks. They seemed farther apart than ever, and not just because of the physical distance between them.

In the corner of the kitchen I ran into Matteo, who gave me a kind smile, and although I tried not to, I found myself picturing Natalia again, completely naked, riding that man furiously. For an instant I thought that if I blushed, he'd find out I knew, but luckily, neither of us lingered. Matteo nodded and continued on his way to the living room while I quickened my step. Relieved, I looked for Gertrud in the hallway. Richard, at the far end, was resting in an armchair while Erica held the crutches. Both were laughing at something I couldn't make out. That relationship was, by far, the only thing that usually brightened my day. Richard deserved someone much better than Natalia.

"Gertrud, I need a pair of gloves," I said as soon as I reached her. Her height forced me to look up, as if I were trying to communicate with a giant. Her eyes, set a little too close together on her broad, round face, answered me with the reproach I'd expected.

"I've already given you several pairs these past weeks, Miss Allen."

"I know, and I really appreciate it. It's just that the last pair froze solid."

"Again."

"Yes, again."

Gertrud seemed to think about something while she nodded slowly.

"That's what happens when they're left out in the open. Do you need them right now, Miss Allen?"

I played it down. I didn't want to rush her. If I played my cards right, I could stay there until nightfall, I thought, touching the walkie-talkie I had hidden in the pocket of my jacket.

"No, no, no rush. Whenever you can. I'll be around here a while longer."

"I understand. I have to go down to the pantry," Gertrud explained. "When I come back I'll ask Roberto to go down and fetch another pair. Is that all right with you, Miss Allen? Although there may not be any left in your size. We'll add a few more pairs to the next ferry order in case it happens again. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to attending to the house."

Gertrud spun on her heel and disappeared toward Richard's room. Tom, near the entrance, was balancing his rail-thin body on a wooden stepladder while trying to open a shutoff valve on a pipe in the corner of the ceiling. For a few seconds I watched him flail out of rhythm with his arms fully stretched until he almost lost his balance. Curious to know what the hell he was doing, I ended up going over to him.

"Hey, Tom, you need me to hold the stepladder? That thing's way too high."

Tom said no, shaking his head several times. With his arm stretched over the wood paneling, he managed to turn the little wheel twice clockwise, then back the other way. Standing less than three feet away, I held up my hands in case the kid toppled onto the carpet.

"No need, really, Miss Allen," Tom said, with some strain in his voice from staying in such an uncomfortable position.

"Tom, want me to go get Mike?"

Tom said no again, this time more firmly. When he finished turning the valve a few seconds later, he climbed down in a very ungainly way.

"I thought Caleb had finished with the heating," I said.

"This isn't the heating, Miss Allen. It's the hot water for the upstairs sinks."

"But nobody ever sleeps upstairs. Why turn the hot water on now?"

Tom shrugged in that gesture he always made whenever anyone asked him something.

"Ask Mrs. Gertrud, Miss Allen."

I smiled out of politeness as I watched my father, outside, stub out a cigarette and come back inside the house through the other end of the hallway. If he kept eating so much without exercising, he was going to end up like one of those seals Gertrud said you could sometimes spot in winter resting among the rocks of the cliff.

Once Tom headed back down to the basement, I stood there wondering whether I'd miss those walls. In general, I'd always felt like a captive of the island; even so, there had also been moments when I thought I was growing a little fond of the silence that used to reign in those enormous rooms. Of all the houses I'd lived in, the main house was by far the biggest. And truth be told, I'd never have been able to spend so much time in such a luxurious place if it weren't for that crazy scheme Wilkins & Wilkins had cooked up for us. I almost felt sorry for all of them once they realized I'd no longer be there. Although, to be honest, none of us there deserved a single cent. If Uncle Max's inheritance was real, in my opinion only Richard had shown himself worthy of receiving such a gift. Not my mother, so God-fearing but at the same time so selfish, not my father, a man with no education and no understanding of the world, and least of all the Natalia she had become, completely at the mercy of her demons; none of them would do anything good with all that money.

Before heading to the kitchen for a bottle of water, I examined the shutoff valve in the ceiling again with some curiosity. The corner where the wooden beam met the wall, right in a recess, was dark. Even so, I caught myself squinting to make out a fleeting glint that seemed to have flashed. Curious, I climbed onto the last step of the stepladder, trying to examine it more closely. The valve wheel stuck out from the slightly chipped black pipe, but what intrigued me more was what was just to its right. It was another tiny black object. A box? There was a little box with a tiny LED that, all of a sudden, flashed again in two very quick red pulses. What the hell was that?

Once I was sure no one was around, I took my phone out of my pocket and turned on the flashlight. Sure enough, it was a very small box, almost invisible, and in addition to the LED, it had a small dark opening in the center. I tried to stretch my arm out farther to see it better, but it was impossible. Whatever it was that had come into view when Tom started messing with the wheel, it was too small and too far away for me to reach from there. I looked around for something taller I could climb onto without making too much of a scene, then took a photo of it with my phone. Even from a distance, the zoom might capture some more detail.

"Miss Allen, I need the stepladder," Tom said just as I was climbing down from it.

"Sure, Tom," I said.

Alone again, with Richard and Erica far away and no one nearby, I zoomed in on the photo. The camera wasn't very good, and although the flash had gone off, the grain and the resolution made it hard to make out much beyond the little box and the wheel. What the hell was that thing? As I panned around the photo and tried to apply a brightness filter, I frowned. Shit, was that a cable? Just below the shutoff valve, I made out something else. Yes. No doubt about it. A small black cable seemed to come out of the little box and run parallel to the pipe, continuing along the hallway away from where Richard and Erica were doing their rehab exercises.

Trying to go unnoticed, I spent the next few minutes examining the shutoff valves along the entire wall, around the corner, and into the back rooms, including the room where my mother sewed and the room beside it, where my father watched his golf matches. At each valve, or at each of the pipe connections, I seemed able to make out one of those little boxes. Was it a security system, or were these the cameras I'd always thought Wilkins & Wilkins used to watch us from a distance?

Much more intrigued, I followed the cable from what seemed to be the last little box and saw it run through a hole in a wooden panel in the west corner of the side hallway. On the other side there was a small, half-empty room where Roberto and Tom kept the tablecloths, the chairs, and other breakfast supplies.

I went into the room without taking my eyes off the cable, which was so well hidden among the wood paneling that, if it hadn't been for Tom and the shutoff valve, it would have stayed completely camouflaged forever. The problem was that the cable ran into the last wall and apparently nowhere beyond it. It came straight from the living room and vanished into thin air. There was nothing beyond the room, I reminded myself, running my finger along the seam of the wooden panels that ran from the ceiling down to the floor. Did it go up to some upstairs room, or straight down to the basement? Examining the corner from a bit farther back, convinced the cable couldn't have turned off somewhere else, I ran into Tom again, carrying the stepladder under his arm.

"Hey, Tom, do you know how many rooms are up there?"

With the stepladder still in his hands, the kid scratched his neck before answering.

"Five in the east wing, five more in the west, Miss Allen," he said with a faintly smug air, as if the question were insultingly easy.

"And they're all open, right?"

Tom took a little longer to answer.

"There are no other guests in the house besides you, Miss Allen."

"Yeah, I know there's no one else. The question was whether any of them are locked. One we don't have access to. Something secret," I added in a lower voice, playfully.

"Upstairs?"

"Or downstairs, in the basement."

Tom shifted uncomfortably.

"You have access to the whole island, Miss Allen," he said with a hint of distrust. "There's nothing locked here."

"So there's no hidden room? One of those places with lots of screens and lots of cables," I asked, playing coy while I stepped a little closer to him. I knew that boy sometimes looked at me with something more than ordinary curiosity. Even so, Tom turned away nervously and walked over to the opposite corner to lean the stepladder against the wall.

"I don't know what you're talking about, Miss Allen. But I'm sure if you ask Mrs. Gertrud, she'll be able to give you a much better answer than I can."

Gertrud, yeah, right.

When Tom left that room, and after examining the wall the cable hid behind several times, I had a somewhat ridiculous idea. But it was worth a try. In a hurry, I went over to the door and paced off the width of the room. Three and a half. Then I stepped through the doorway and paced off the entire hallway until I reached the door to the kitchens at the other end, just past the guest bathroom. Thirty-four paces.

"Good morning, Miss Allen," I heard as I crossed the double doors into the kitchen. Matteo was there, cutting into an enormous piece of meat with one of those knives so sharp it looked as if the blade could cut you from across the room. Beside him, Henrik -- the other cook, who sometimes traded shifts with him -- was peeling tomatoes, and Erica came out of the pantry with a bottle of water in her hands, for Richard, I assumed.

"Signora Allen," she said with that singsong accent of hers.

Henrik and Matteo did a perfect job of hiding their curiosity when they saw me walk from the double doors to the far wall of the kitchen, where the faucets and utensil cabinets were. How deep were those back cabinets? Two feet? I started adding up in my head the three and a half for the room, plus the thirty-four for the hallway, plus the kitchen. It came to forty-five, give or take a pace.

"Would you like to try the avocado sauce today, Miss Allen?" Matteo asked me as he headed back toward the hallway.

"Yeah, sure, Matteo," I replied, repeating in my head the hundred and fifty feet that house measured across.

I went out to the porch, crossing paths with Gertrud, who was chatting with my mother about how the holly bushes that surrounded many of the outer corners of the house managed to survive there.

"As long as a female has a male nearby, the hollies will keep producing berries all year round," she was explaining to my mother.

"Hey, Ioanna, wait a second," my mother said. I kept walking. "Have you seen your father?" I heard when I was already a few steps past her.

"I saw him in the hallway. I think he was going to the downstairs bathroom."

My mother smiled at me before turning to go on talking about the hollies. She might have been my mother, but I didn't think I'd ever miss either of them once I got away from there. And that was something any of the psychologists who'd been visiting us for months could have told me. Family ties could only break if they had existed in the first place. But since I was a little girl, that loneliness and the feeling of never being understood had followed me wherever I went. Would they miss me? I supposed that at first they'd blame each other until they realized they had both spent their lives making mine impossible. Fuck them both, I told myself.

The midmorning cold slapped me in the face again when a gust rose without warning and scraped a chair across the porch. I turned my head from side to side, feeling my cheeks freeze, and zipped my coat back up to my neck. It was a clear morning, and from there I could see how our cabins peered out with a certain wariness toward the paths that ended far off at the cliff. Would Luna come in from that direction, or would they prefer to circle around to the west side? That would be much safer than coming by the beach and that reef.

Weaving around some plastic chairs and a couple of empty flowerpots, I reached the wall at the east end, where the kitchens would be.

"Are you all right, Miss Allen? Do you need anything?" Roberto asked, wheeling an empty wheelbarrow along the path that snaked to the back area, where the two big trash bins sat and the recycling bin for the cardboard Amazon boxes that carried our ferry deliveries.

"No, thanks, Roberto. All good."

I waited a few seconds until I lost sight of him, then looked straight ahead. My mother and Gertrud were no longer there. Good. They'd left the whole porch to me, from the very corner where I was to the other end of the house. I started moving forward, step by step. One, two, three, four... I kept going until I reached... forty-seven and a half? I turned around, puzzled. In the background, the dark green tops of the pines had begun to sway the way they did when storms threatened to unleash all their fury right over the island. The damp was growing thick and biting.

"Ioanna, for heaven's sake, what are you doing out there?" my mother asked, sticking her head out one of the doors. "You're going to get sick. Remember, you always get sick as soon as winter arrives. Would you please come inside?"

"Sure, Mom," I said, waiting for her to get tired of talking to me as if I were ten, which happened just a few seconds later.

"Suit yourself, my dear," she said before going back inside the house.

Alone again, I walked back the way I'd come, concentrating on the paces: forty-seven and a half.

As soon as Tom stepped out with a rake in his hand, I went back into the central hallway and, with a furrowed brow, examined it carefully from wall to wall. I mentally marked where the room with the breakfast chairs began and went back outside. If I hadn't miscalculated too much, that room ought to start a few paces past the window of my father's room. Roughly twenty feet from the edge of the last window to the wall. With my hands on my hips and my breath billowing in front of me, I began to realize that something was seriously wrong. Either my stride outside had been wildly different, or more than two and a half paces were missing inside. That was too much to be a mistake.

Annoyed, I went to the tablecloth room and spent a while staring hard at the wall. As if a thought had suddenly struck me, I walked up and punched the wood. Then again, a little farther to the right. Then once more, to the left. I put my ear to it while I did it. Nothing. It all sounded the same. Frustrated once again with that fucking island, I gritted my teeth. Come on, Ioanna, I told myself. If there was something there, I had to be able to find it.

The floor of the room was covered with thick carpet, which met shiny wood paneling around the edges. A radiator hung from one of the walls, and across from it, several tables stood upright, stacked against one another. I looked at the cable above again. Then the floor. Shit. Then I went over to the door I'd come in through and closed it from the inside. It was the only room that had no window. In an act of desperation, I decided to stay in the dark and sulk over what a lousy detective I'd turned out to be. When I flipped the switch, my heart skipped a beat. Where was that light coming from? Shit, I thought. At floor level, between the carpet and the wall, some kind of bluish, flickering light seemed to glow.

With my heart beating much faster than before and completely committed to the mission, I crossed the room in the dark and knelt on the carpet. I tried to pull up a corner of it, but it was stuck down tight. But there was light. Hell yes there was. I felt along the wall from below. If there was light, there had to be a room on the other side. And if there was a room, it would account for the eight feet missing from the interior measurement. I ran both hands slowly up the wood, little by little, without missing a single inch, feeling every rough spot as though it might be the button that would trigger a secret passage. And so, a few minutes later, as I ran my index finger over a small molding, I heard a mechanical click. A small opening appeared in front of me. I hurried to turn the room light back on and went back to it. It was a lock. A goddamn lock hidden in the middle of a wall.

Clenching my fists at having finally discovered the secret of that house, I looked around nervously. Who could have the key? It looked like a new lock, so I didn't think I could force it. Gertrud must have a key, I told myself as my thoughts spiraled, each one crazier and more impossible than the last. I was sure that woman wore it around her neck and wouldn't part with it even at night. And what about the shed? There were thousands of tools there. Tonight, once everyone was asleep, I could go over and try to open it. In the movies they did it with a couple of bobby pins, so it couldn't be that hard.

I slid the wood back over the opening and left the room, mentally planning how I would tackle that challenge. That was when I realized something strange was going on. Richard, instead of walking on his crutches, was looking out the window with an alarmed expression. Erica, at his side, was doing the same. Both looked worried.

"What's going on?" I asked, going over to them.

Richard craned his neck as though that would let him see farther toward the dock.

"A boat," he said. "Looks like a boat's run aground on the beach."

"Signor Mike give alarm," Erica added.

I opened my eyes wide. Luna.

"Fuck," I exclaimed, running flat out toward the porch.

Luna, I repeated to myself with every stride along the path to the beach. And as I ran, I tried to pull the walkie-talkie out of my pocket. How could that goddamn thing have turned off on me? And how the fuck had Luna shown up there without warning in broad daylight? My mind racing, I crossed paths with Tom, who was going a bit slower, and then with Caleb, who was limping along at an awkward jog. In the distance, Mike was running with two or three of those workers who came and went every week and whose names I never quite learned. My father, out in front, was trying to run even faster.

When I reached the beach I froze completely. The boat, bigger than I'd imagined, had run aground on the same rocks where the skiff of those two wretches had run aground weeks earlier. Because it was much bigger, it had listed so far to port that it seemed about to capsize. The waves pounded hard against its hull, and with each assault the boat lurched violently from port to starboard. My mother arrived beside me, and in front of us, Mike was shouting with his hands cupped around his mouth:

"Is anyone in there?" he shouted, trying to make himself heard over the roar of the surf.

"There!" Caleb shouted then. "Between the rocks!"

My heart was leaping out of my chest. I couldn't believe what was happening. Luna, Robin... and that boat? Something about it didn't add up.

"It's a man!" Mike howled, all of a sudden.

A blur shot past me and plunged into the water without hesitation. It was my father.

"Liam, for God's sake, don't go!" my mother shouted in a very shrill voice, full of fear.

Mike plunged into the water behind my father, too. Both fought the waves as if wrestling themselves free of a knot. Relentless and violent, indifferent to whatever it swept away, the sea kept battering the boat and the rocks. My mother took a step across the sand toward the water, but Caleb stopped her from taking the next one.

"Mike's a good swimmer," he said. "I'm sure he'll keep your husband safe."

I couldn't see anything beyond the breakers. The crashing waves hurled foam into the air, and the screeching sound of the boat about to split in half had me badly on edge. I wanted to pull out the walkie-talkie and ask Luna if she was okay, but it was a ridiculous idea. Of course she wasn't okay.

For several agonizing minutes we all stayed on the shore, waiting for my father and Mike to emerge from the waves. And when they did, we saw them dragging the body of a middle-aged man dressed in a plaid shirt. My father vomited onto the sand as he collapsed while Mike dragged the man the remaining few yards to get him clear of the danger. My mother shoved past me as she ran to where my father lay flat on his back, completely exhausted and half frozen. Fearful but even more curious, I approached the man Mike had rescued. I'd never seen a photo of Robin, but based on what Luna had told me about the guy she'd hooked up with, this man didn't fit the description. He was older. At least twenty years older than us. I couldn't picture Luna in bed with that guy. The man seemed to be coming around. As I stood near him, beside Mike, who was also throwing up, I looked back at the boat. That wasn't a skiff. It was a yacht. A very luxurious one, assuming the waves didn't swallow it first.

The man coughed up an enormous amount of water before beginning to thrash. Mike tried to keep him from moving, but the guy seemed out of his mind.

"Daniel," he said, then coughed. He tried to speak again but dissolved into another fit of coughing. "Daniel!" he shouted, much louder now, toward the sea.

My mother and father were still on the shore, though now Caleb was helping them away from the water. The two crewmen were trying to reach the boat by swimming in from another direction, where there were far fewer rocks and it seemed easier to reach the deck.

Then I felt the guy grab me by the sleeve and, wild-eyed, shout at me.

"My son! Daniel! Daniel!" he repeated before coughing again.

Terrified, I pulled free of him. Then I looked at the sea. Even in broad daylight, I could barely see anything beyond the first row of rocks. Slowly I moved away from everyone and walked toward one end of the beach. I took shelter behind the trunk of a very thick pine and, pressing my back against its bark, took out the walkie-talkie, trembling with fear.

"Luna? Luna, are you there?" I asked, pressing the button. But I got nothing. I turned the volume wheel up as far as it would go and pressed the button again. "Ioanna to Luna. Robin. Does anyone hear me?"

As the latest wave rolled in, the sea reached almost to the rock on my right. It was at that instant that I saw a ghostly pale human hand appear out of nowhere. With my hair standing on end, I jumped back, dropping the walkie-talkie, which burst into a thousand pieces as it hit the rock. The next wave dragged the body farther up the beach. He was a boy, dark-haired, somewhat thin, with a thick sweater completely soaked. He seemed to be carrying all the sand on the beach in his hair.

I went up to him slowly, and when the next wave came in, I grabbed his icy hand and pulled him with all my strength toward dry land.

"Hey!" I shouted. "Help! Help, please!"

A few seconds later, Mike came running to help me.

"Here!" he shouted. "We found him!"

Mike turned the boy's body over and began giving him mouth-to-mouth. I, at his side, didn't move a muscle despite the cold that made my teeth chatter. That boy had purple lips and very pale skin. Was this what dead people looked like? I thought. But after a few attempts, the kid rolled onto his side, letting out a sea from his mouth.

Before I could understand what was happening, the man rushed over, shoved through the crowd around the boy, and pulled him into a tight embrace.

Mike stepped aside, making room for the two of them, and waved the rest of us back sharply. Behind us, we heard the boat's engines roar to life, followed by a shrill scrape as it somehow managed to free itself from the jaws of the reef and head back out to sea.

"Daniel, Daniel, are you all right, my son?"

The boy seemed as scared as the rest of us. Even so, he nodded before vomiting up another wave of seawater.

"Who are they?" I heard my mother ask Caleb.

"No idea," he replied.

Gertrud arrived a few minutes later in the pickup. And she nearly ran us all over when she hit the brakes and the wheels locked, sending the small vehicle skidding out of control down the icy ramp. Once she managed to bring the vehicle under control, the woman got out like a SWAT officer in the middle of an operation. With two quick gestures she wrapped dry blankets around the father and son and, with the help of Caleb and Mike, they lifted the kid into the pickup bed. His father climbed into the bed with him.

"Any signs of frostbite?" Gertrud asked, getting back into the cab.

"None that I've seen. But the kid swallowed a lot of seawater," Mike explained through the window. Then he ran to the passenger seat. After some difficulty getting the pickup turned around, they began climbing the hill back to the main house very slowly.

In the distance, the yacht seemed to have withstood the blows and was now sailing at full throttle toward the main dock. My mother, along with my father and Caleb, stopped beside me.

"Are you all right, sweetheart?" my mother asked, running her frozen hands over my face.

I nodded, pushing her hands off me. I felt like crying. For a moment, when I'd seen that hand come out of the water, I'd thought it was Luna, and my whole world had come crashing down. I needed time to recover from the fright.

"Who are they?" I asked.

"Beats me," my father said, with Caleb now helping him take his first steps. He was completely soaked and his face was starting to turn purple.

"Let's go home and warm up," my mother murmured. "For the love of God, what were you thinking, jumping into the sea like that? You could have drowned. What on earth got into you?"

Before leaving the beach, I turned my head. The waves kept battering the island's edge, and I remembered the shattered remains of the walkie-talkie lying by the tree. Shit, I thought. Shit, Ioanna. How are you going to talk to Luna now? How will I know you're coming to get me?

"Come on, honey," I heard my mother say. "You're soaked too."

I quickened my pace, my breath steaming in front of me. I felt both sleeves of my coat soaked through, and my feet weighed much more than usual. When I reached the top, I realized that Natalia, with her white hair hanging loose and her arms crossed, was standing motionless atop a rocky outcrop, watching us. Freezing, I brought my hands to my mouth and blew hard on them to warm them. I felt my whole body starting to tremble, more from what might have been than from the temperature. And then I coughed hard until I thought I would split in half, just like that boat. Getting off that island was turning out to be much more complicated than I'd ever believed.

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Author's Note: As the eighth month on the island approaches, everything is beginning to fall apart, and the arrival of a visitor will accelerate certain events. If everything goes as I planned from the beginning, the story will come to a close in just four more chapters, for better or worse. Thank you to everyone who continues walking the paths of Nela Island. See you in the next chapter.