But then my eyes met his. And I saw their fear.
“Vanessa,” he called out, his voice steady but loud. “Don’t move.”
I slid to a stop.
“It’s cracking,” he continued. “Behind you.”
And then I heard it. Creaking and snapping, like snow-laden branches breaking off trees.
“Stay perfectly still.” He lowered his hands and started backing up, away from me.
He continued toward the rowboat. Instinctively, I took a step forward to follow him—and froze when the ice groaned beneath me. As I stood there, not breathing, I had a clear picture of Simon reaching the boat and pausing briefly before taking something from inside.
An oar. With a trail of shiny red anchors running down the handle.
It was the last thing I saw before the ice split between my feet, and I dropped into the chilled harbor below.
“A
RE YOU SURE
you don’t want to sneak out to your house?” Paige asked later that night. “Ours is so drafty, we’d probably be warmer in a tent.”
“I’m sure.” I wasn’t worried about drafts. I
was
worried about what else I might find at the lake house, in addition to a missing rowboat. I’d been whisked off the ice too quickly for a close inspection, but Simon had admitted the boat looked more like ours than not—and ours was supposed to be locked up in the lake house shed for the winter. “But if you’re too uncomfortable, we can always go back to Boston.”
“Now?” She peered out at me from the small opening in the down comforter she was wrapped in. “It’s almost midnight.”
“I can drive. I feel fine.”
“You just stopped shaking, like, ten minutes ago.”
She was right—but that had nothing to do with being cold.
“By the way,” she continued, stretching out on the couch across from mine, “how crazy was it that Grandma Betty and Oliver just happened to be driving by the marina, their car fully loaded with blankets and dry clothes, five minutes after you fell in the water?”
“Not very, considering she’s Winter Harbor’s favorite super senior citizen.”
Paige smiled. “Good point. She probably heard the ice cracking before Simon did.”
Ever since Paige’s grandmother went swimming in the middle of a lightning storm two years ago, she’d had supersensory powers—excluding her vision, which she’d lost. She could apparently hear flowers blooming, whales singing, and hearts beating from miles away. When she’d arrived at the marina, she’d told the crowd gathered around us that she and Oliver (her favorite male companion, as she called him) had been on their way to make a donation to the thrift shop when they noticed the commotion… but the blankets were hot, as if pulled from a dryer only moments before, and the clothes were exactly my size. Thanks to her, I warmed up fast enough to convince Simon I didn’t need to go to the emergency room.
“Did you see anything?” Paige asked quietly a moment later.
I focused on the flames flickering in the fireplace. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I know where you fell was miles away from Chione Cliffs… but what lives underwater swims underwater, right?”
I looked at her and forced a smile. “I was under for a matter of seconds. I saw ice, darkness, and Simon. That’s it.”
She exhaled. “Thank goodness. Maybe I’ll actually sleep tonight.”
We fell into a comfortable silence. To keep distracted from my own thoughts, I focused on the sounds of snapping wood and howling wind, which were soon joined by the soft sound of Paige’s deep breathing.
I closed my eyes and waited for sleep. When my cell phone buzzed in my sweatshirt pocket ten minutes later, I was staring at the ceiling and happy to have something to do.
Are you awake?
—S
Of course
, I wrote back.
Are you OK?
He’d asked this earlier, but I hadn’t had a chance to give him a real answer. Caleb was there when Simon lifted me out of the water, and Captain Monty, Riley, Paige, and other party guests were watching and listening from a nearby fishing boat that Captain Monty had managed to navigate toward us through slush and ice.
A little rattled, but otherwise fine
. I paused, my thumbs hovering over the keypad, before adding,
I miss you, though
.
I’d barely hit Send when another text popped up.
Do you want me to come over?
I stared at the screen. There was nothing I wanted more than to see him; before my impromptu dip this afternoon, the plan had been for Paige to spend the night with Grandma Betty while I went to the lake house, where Simon would meet me after his parents had gone to bed. But then Grandma Betty had insisted I stay with them, and I’d been too scared to argue.
It’s late
, I typed.
How about an early breakfast?
Harbor Homefries, 8 a.m.?
I agreed to the meeting, then closed the phone and looked at Paige. I couldn’t see her under the blanket, but the white mound rose and fell every few seconds. Satisfied she was out, I pushed aside my own comforter, got up, and started across the living room.
Paige hadn’t wanted to sleep in her room—or anywhere on the second floor—and I didn’t blame her. Back home, I’d offered to stay in Justine’s room so Paige could have mine, and as weird as it sometimes was, and as much as it could feel like I hadn’t known Justine at all, I did know one thing: she wasn’t a murderer. Paige’s situation was obviously very different, and I understood her wanting to keep her distance.
But that didn’t mean I had to.
The only light came from the fireplace and faded as I climbed the stairs. When I reached the top step, it was so dark I couldn’t see my hand on the banister. I felt along the wall for a switch, but there wasn’t any.
This was normally the point at which, if I’d even made it this far, I’d bolt back down the stairs. But surprisingly, I felt okay. Calm. Strong. The feeling had started as soon as I hit the water and intensified quickly. I was submerged less than a minute, but by the time I was back on solid ground and my body had had a chance to absorb the natural salt, I felt better physically than I had since jumping off Chione Cliffs.
I’d taken only two steps down the hall when I heard a familiar voice.
“Can’t sleep, Vanessa?”
I froze, then turned slowly to see Betty standing in the open doorway of her bedroom.
“You thought it was your boat, didn’t you?” she asked.
I stepped toward her. “I know it was my boat.”
“But they’re dead.”
Our eyes locked. Hers were usually aimed up, but now they found and seemed to hold mine in place. In the dim lighting, their gray clouds appeared to shift and move, just like the ones in the sky. “How do you know?” I asked.
She stepped aside and waited. As I entered the room, I breathed in the salty ocean air blowing through the open windows. I hadn’t been in Betty’s room since the morning of the Northern Lights Festival last summer, and it looked different. The walls, which had been filled with needlepoint images of Chione Cliffs, were bare. The fireplace was dark. The carpet had been replaced with dark hardwood floors. Besides Betty her-self, the only thing that indicated the room belonged to her was the purple swimsuit hanging from a hook on the bathroom door.
And an older, tired-looking man, sitting in a rocking chair by the windows.
“Hi, Oliver,” I said.
He looked up from the open notebook in his lap. I wondered if he was working on another volume of
The Complete History of Winter Harbor
. He’d written several over the past thirty years—mostly, he claimed, to distract Betty from her own fears with
stories of the adopted home she loved.
“Vanessa,” he said, and returned his gaze to the notebook.
That was odd. When I’d first met Oliver, he’d been cool, even cranky. But he’d slowly warmed up as he had helped us figure out what was going on in Winter Harbor, and couldn’t have been nicer after he and Betty had reunited following a years-long separation. This greeting, unaccompanied by a “hello” or a smile, was one the old Oliver would’ve given.
Before I could ask if I was interrupting, Betty sat in a velvet armchair by the fireplace and continued speaking.
“I’d hear them,” she said. “Their voices fell silent the second the water froze, and they never spoke again.”
Not wanting to bother Oliver, who was now writing, I stepped toward her and lowered my voice. “But it was my boat. Mine and Justine’s. It was worn in the same places, and one oar had—”
“Red anchor stickers.” Betty tilted her head. “Just like the kind the Winter Harbor pharmacy sells at the register, the kind every child begs her parents to buy. If you look closely, you’ll find them all over town—on garbage cans, newspaper bins, street signs.”
I frowned. Now that she mentioned it, I could picture them. And the pharmacy was where Justine had bought hers the day she decided to decorate the oars.
“If Raina and Zara were alive,” Betty continued, “and if they were planning some kind of revenge, I would know.”
“But they’d try to keep it from you, wouldn’t they? They’d know you could hear their thoughts and be careful to control what they think.”
“I’d still hear their efforts to focus on other things. All sirens are connected, so it’s possible to hear a stranger’s thoughts if you try hard enough, though it isn’t easy. But you can always hear family. Even if you don’t want to.”
I looked away, like she could actually see the doubt on my face. My eyes fell on the bed on the other side of the room; it, too, looked different, covered in one thin sheet instead of layers of blankets, as if Betty hadn’t slept in it since the day I’d found her lying there, her dried skin flaking, so thirsty she couldn’t speak.
“She was kind.”
I looked at Betty. She motioned for me to sit in the chair across from hers.
“Your mother, Charlotte Bleu, owned a small bookstore on the outskirts of town. She’d let people read there for hours, never caring whether they finished books without buying them. She carried an impressive collection, too—lots of rare and first editions that she could’ve sold for a great deal of money, but that she gave away if a customer was interested and couldn’t pay the asking price.”
It took a second to find the words for my next questions. “Is that where she met my dad? At her bookstore?”
Betty paused. “I don’t know.”
“Did you see them together? Did they ever come to the restaurant?”
“No. But as far as I understand, they weren’t together long.”
Now that we were actually talking about her, the questions came faster than I could ask them. “Did Raina say anything else? She obviously knew about them, since she had their picture. Did she take that picture? If not, whoever did must know more about—”
“Vanessa, I’m afraid I’ve told you all I know. If Raina knew more, well…”
I sat back. If Raina knew more, we’d never find out.
We were silent for a long moment. The only sounds were the light flapping of fabric as the curtains lifted in the breeze, and the rustling of paper as Oliver turned pages. I had countless questions about Charlotte, Dad, the first year of my life, the inconsistent effects of my abilities. But there was one question I needed to ask above all the others. One that, at this point, only Betty could answer.
I glanced at Oliver. He was engrossed in his work and didn’t seem to be paying attention to us, but I leaned closer to Betty and lowered my voice to a whisper anyway.
“I drink salt water,” I said. “Constantly. I take two saltwater baths every day. That helps, but I still get so thirsty and hot. And now I’m having these terrible headaches that won’t go away no matter how much aspirin I take.”
I paused, giving her a chance to tell me what I needed to know without my having to ask. But she didn’t. Her face, like her eyes, remained blank.
“Betty,” I continued, my voice trembling, “how do you do this? How do I do this?”
There was a loud, single knock behind us. I jumped. Betty didn’t.
“It’s late,” Oliver said, suddenly next to us. The rocking chair, which had apparently hit the wall when he stood, moved forward and back, forward and back, like it was still occupied. “We should all get some sleep.”
His head was turned toward me, but his eyes aimed over my shoulder.
“Paige is waking,” Betty added coolly. “She’ll worry if you’re not there.”
Torn between wanting to try to learn more and getting out of there as fast as possible, I finally stood and walked across the room. At the door I turned to say something—to thank Betty, to assure her that Paige was doing well, or to offer something else that kept this brief visit from ending awkwardly—but then I saw her standing perfectly still before the open window, the wind whipping her long gray hair around her head. Like she was listening intently to something only she could hear.
“Goodnight, Vanessa,” Oliver said evenly.
I stepped into the hallway and closed the door as fast as I could without slamming it. I had one hand on the stairwell banister and was about to start down when it occurred to me that I shouldn’t be able to see the banister. The hallway was brighter than it had been when I came upstairs, and the new source of light seemed to be coming from behind me.
It’s a lamp… or a candle
, I told myself.
You just didn’t notice it before…
.
But it wasn’t a lamp or a candle. It was a glowing, silver stream rippling across the floor at the other end of the hall.
I glanced toward Betty’s room; her door was still closed. I listened for Paige, but she was silent. So was the rest of the house—even the wind seemed to have stopped. All I could hear as I headed slowly down the hallway was the ancient floorboards creaking beneath my feet.
Reaching Zara’s old bedroom, I stopped and looked down. The cool, silver light streamed out from under the door and washed over my bare feet like water on the beach. The last time I’d stood in this spot, Justine had encouraged me to go inside. I waited for similar encouragement now, but it didn’t come.
I grabbed the glowing doorknob—and yanked my hand back when the brass scalded my palm. It felt like I’d just touched an open flame, but the knob wasn’t hot. It was ice cold. It burned a shimmery blue and seemed to pulsate in time to my pounding heart.
Closing my eyes, I pictured the inside of the room as I’d last seen it. White furniture. Crystal perfume bottles. A million bursts of light reflected in floor-to-ceiling mirrors.
I took the knob, twisted, shoved the door.
The silver light went out.
I fumbled for the cell phone in my sweatshirt pocket and flipped it open. I aimed it inside the room, but the dim beam was swallowed by blackness.
I glanced down the empty hallway. The crack beneath Betty’s door, lit just seconds ago, was also dark.
I exhaled. The power must’ve gone out. Lamps had been turned on in Zara’s room, and my overactive nerves had simply transformed their normal light into something else. Which was completely understandable, considering everything I’d learned in the Marchands’ house—and that this was my first time back since the day Winter Harbor froze.