Chapter 20

20

My fifth-grade teacher, Ms. Bamber, used to offer extra credit occasionally where she would give us a brainteaser, and the first person to solve it got to skip a Friday ten-question quiz of their choice. They were always things like: Mr. Brown lives in a blue house and has a black cat, and Mr. White lives next to the pink house and has a brown dog... stuff like that, and you'd have to work out who lived in all the houses and had what pet from what you'd been given. I love these things. I won a lot of quiz passes. It got to be the thing people knew I could do. The strange thing was, I'd start by taking a few notes on who lived where and had what, and then I'd stare at it and I would figure it out. Ms. Bamber asked me how I did it, and I couldn't remember. I remembered the experience of working it out. I had glimpses of moving the parts around in my head, but the last steps were a blur, and then they were gone. I was left with a buzz and an answer and a free quiz pass.

It had never really come in handy before. But say you're in an old death house and you find yourself stuck in a storm and you're holding a human tooth. You start to think about life a little differently. My brain began to assemble the pieces. The floating cushion and the paddleboard, both on their own, cast off from this island. The dry spot under the yoga mat, which wasn't where it was supposed to be. The camera. Everything Riki had been telling me about the house falling asleep all at once, the boy who didn't like to swim found in the water, a girl going mad and dancing off the roof...

Which took me right back to that yoga mat.

People fell in this house, or they drowned.

People fell from other places. People like Chris.

I looked up the stone face of the building at the balcony far above. Clara had fallen a long way. It must have been brutal. If you fell from the top of this building and landed anywhere on your face, you were probably going to lose a tooth. Now that I thought about it, I imagined someone landing and raining teeth, like a terrible pi?ata.

No one wants a pi?ata full of teeth.

Best-case scenario here—I was holding an old Ralston tooth. I don't know what happens to human teeth if they're left out for almost a hundred years partially covered by a patio stone. Of course, I'd seen lots of shows where they found bones—like that old show Bones , which was just bones as far as the eye could see. (The main doctor on that, the one they called Bones because she knew about bones—she might have liked the pi?ata full of teeth. That lady really liked bones.) On shows, the bones always looked dirtier. Brown. This was not dirty or brown. It looked like a fresh tooth. Clean. A creamy color. I flicked the pad of my index finger against the broken edge and found it was sharp. I looked up the mullioned balcony edge—it had that up-and-down pattern that you see on the tops of castles. Sort of like teeth.

Everything was teeth now.

Dr. Henson had been on that high balcony doing yoga the morning she'd vanished. Exactly the spot where Clara Ralston fell from. The idea that had been slowly assembling itself in the corner of my mind—this little being of lingering glances and small thoughts—now had a literal bone to chew on. It stood up. It spoke to me. It said the thing I did not want it to say.

Dr. Henson had been murdered.

Of course she wasn't murdered. I wouldn't be in a house where a murder had happened.

I'd been in a place where a fire had happened.

But fires happen. Fires are natural. Murder is unnatural. And why would anyone murder Dr. Henson?

The sky had gone a dark shade of green. The invading cloud army was getting closer. It burped up internal rumbles of electricity. It would be here soon, and it would be bad. Whatever was happening, I was now the keeper of the tooth because there was no way of getting it to anyone who could do something useful with it.

I dragged the cushions inside and dropped them on the sitting room floor. I just had to play it cool, hide the tooth, act like nothing was wrong. Once the storm cleared, I could hand the tooth to the police and get the hell off the island.

I hurried through the hall, down the back steps, and tried to get past the kitchen door without anyone spotting me. I continued straight on, to the tunnel, and to the playhouse. I didn't feel great passing through the tunnel, and I kept looking over my shoulder. I got to my room and shut the door. It had no lock.

Where do you hide a tooth? It was small enough that it could go anywhere. But it could get lost. And what if I had to let someone know where it was?

I took the lipstick Akilah had given me and dropped the tooth into the cap. It fit back on when I pressed down. I probably wasn't going to use it again, what with the murdered person's tooth in it. And a lipstick tube covered in my DNA may not have been the best place to keep evidence, but it made the most sense to me.

"Job!" Van said, appearing at the doorway and causing me to scream out loud. He'd opened the door without me even hearing. That's how loud the wind was.

"What?"

"Power's going to go out for sure. So we have a job. We gotta eat all the ice cream. It's our duty as Americans or something."

"Why do you think the power is going to go out?"

"Because it always goes out. Especially on the islands. And this storm is a big one. Don't worry. We have lamps and stuff. But first, ice cream! Kitchen! Now! Come with me, fellow gay."

He extended his hand. I hesitated. Was this the moment to start following people to second locations? Still, I had to play it cool. No one knew what I'd just found.

I went with him.

"I love a storm," he said. "I love the drama. Storms are nature's reality shows. Are you scared of them?"

"No?"

"You seem a little jumpy."

"I'm fine," I said.

It never, ever means that. Ever.

We emerged in the basement. It was darker down here than normal because there was usually some ambient light. Now there was nothing but brown shadows and rattling sounds. I stayed away from the pool, with its twelve-foot drop. Van and I arrived safely in the kitchen, where the others, except for Riki, were sitting around.

"Ice cream?" Tom said. "We have salted caramel, birthday cake, mint chocolate chip, Moose Tracks, peanut butter cup, and butter pecan. You like the Moose Tracks, right?"

I gratefully accepted the half-full pint.

The lights hummed and faded a bit, going to a low orange. I dug into my ice cream like it was the only thing between me and oblivion.

"I know what we should do," Van said. "We should sleep in the big house tonight. We should have a storm party. Let's sleep in the real beds, in the fancy ones. Who's going to stop us?"

"No one was ever going to stop us," Liani said, scooping the last mouthfuls of the salted caramel from the bottom of the container. "Why would we want to?"

"Because they're there."

"They smell," Liani pointed out. "They're musty."

"Where is your sense of adventure?"

I dug fretfully into my pint as they went back and forth on how we should spend our stormy night. This one was thankfully loaded with extra chocolate bits, which were delicious, but again, required chewing, and therefore reminded me of teeth. The rain began to hammer down, striking the low basement windows with such force that it sounded like rocks.

It occurred to me that there was one more step I needed to take. The one thing I had been holding off on—now was the time for it. And I had a message to convey. My phone signal was poor, but it would be good enough. It had to be.

"You know," I said, "I feel like I should call home, just to let my parents know I'm okay."

I crept back out into the dark of the basement and went up the steps and stood in the wide, grand hall of Morning House. The sunrise had been extinguished, and the lamps barely held back the gloom. I opened my contacts. There she was, her face a glow of pure human goodness.

I hit the button and called her. It rang, rang again, and again, and again. It was going to go to voice mail....

"Marlowe?"

There was a lot of noise behind her. Clanking. People talking. I felt like I was falling. The floor of my stomach dropped out and I had to press a hand against the wall for balance. Her voice. Akilah—live, connected to me through waves in the air, in space.

"Hey," I said, trying to sound casual.

"Are you okay?" Akilah said. "I heard something happened to the woman who hired you? It's been on the news. I..."

She had been keeping track of me. Or, at least, she had seen the thing that was all over the local news.

"Listen," I said. "I just want you to know that Midnight Rose is great."

Crashing noises behind her. I hated everyone in that Cheesecake Factory. Why didn't they all just shut up for a second and stop dropping all their shit?

"Wait, I can't hear you. What?"

This wasn't how it was supposed to be. My first conversation with her. It couldn't be plates and people talking about appetizers and yelling.

"The Midnight Rose," I said loudly.

"The lipstick?"

"It's great. I love it ."

"Okay?"

"And..."

And what? And I think my boss got murdered. And I think someone here did it. And I'm trapped in a storm. And I hid a tooth in her lipstick and I loved her.

I should have made this call so much sooner.

"Marlowe, I have to go, but... are you..."

I could barely make out what she was saying. Then the call cut out. Then the power.