July 14, 1932

Clara floated under the floor.

It's hard to keep a secret on an island. You need to find a private place, and if the island is small, this can be difficult. But Clara Ralston was good at finding solutions. They may look for you in every room or on the water or even on a roof, but no one ever looks under their feet.

She found her spot her first summer on the island. Their boathouse was large, and its slips housed their yacht and smaller boats. Clara swam under the dock, into the shadowy water. The stranger things of the river were here—the slimier sea vegetation, reaching up for her like a thousand slippery fingers, the smallest fish with the most to hide, the things that had no name that the river coughed up and spat toward the banks, the things that were probably rocks but you were never sure.

She would sometimes float here for an hour in the dark, the dock above so close at points that it almost touched her face, the crew or members of her family walking right on top of her, speaking and unaware of the person just under the floor, bobbing and smiling. She'd heard many things in her hideaway. She knew about their captain's mistress, Velma, who worked at Eddie's Bar in Clement Bay. The upstairs maid and the gardener would meet here when the crew took the yacht out and canoodle in one of the canoes. She always hoped to overhear something juicy either about or from Father, but he seemed to have no secrets. He was just as boring in private as he was in public.

"Clara?" a voice called.

William had come to meet her for a ride on her speedboat, Silver Arrow . She was not covetous of her boat and would allow her siblings to use it freely. She was, however, careful to guard her secret space, even from William, her closest sibling. She glided silently under the boards, swimming around the boathouse to the shore, emerging through the door as if she'd come from the open water.

"Are you ready?" she asked. "I want to show you something."

Silver Arrow was a magnificent little mahogany speedboat that had come in second in the powerboat races last summer. She could go almost sixty miles an hour. Clara opened her up and cut through the water, her bobbed hair flattening against her head. Sometimes when she went out in her boat, she thought about not stopping, not turning. With a flick of the wrist she could be in Canada. She could step onto its shore and hide in its wilds. Or she could ride the length of the St. Lawrence out to sea.

Today, she steered them toward Washington Island, one of the most sizable islands, just offshore from the town of Clayton.

"Frankie told me about this," she said, slowing the boat down and turning into an inlet. "He said I had to go and have a look."

Frankie was a part-time worker on the island who had recently repaired one of their boats. He was ancient and smoked far too much, but he knew everything about the river. The St. Lawrence was famous for its shipwrecks—it had thousands. Most were deep, a hundred or hundreds of feet down. This one, however, was only about ten feet below the surface, beams clearly visible. She pulled Silver Arrow right on top of it and cut the engine.

"See that?" she said as they tacked gently in place. "Under us. It's the wreck of the Elk . Do you want to hear the story Frankie told me about this one?"

"I don't know if I believe any story Frankie tells."

"Listen. He said that the captain lived here, on Washington Island." She indicated the piece of land only a dozen or so yards away. "He was coming home, and he was drunk—so drunk he rammed into the island. He knew the ship was going to sink, but he thought he could get it in a little closer, so it would be in more shallow water in front of his house. The captain's wife came out and saw her husband outside, on his slowly sinking ship, so she got her paints and she painted it going down. That's how slow it was."

She stood up on her seat, stepped to the edge of the boat, and dove into the clear water. The ship right there—a hundred or so feet of her—the hull bizarrely intact, encrusted in vegetation. It was terrible and wonderful what the water did to the things it claimed. She reached out and tapped the rotting wood, then quickly withdrew her hand and shot to the surface.

"Touched it," she said.

"What for?"

"It's less scary that way," she said as she pulled herself up the back of the boat. "Shipwrecks are eerie, but I can't look away." She hooked her chin on the edge of the boat and looked down at the Elk as a large fish glided by. "This one, it's like us, sinking slowly, right in front of everyone. And they came from Life magazine and took pictures of us going down. I don't know what we look like afterward. No one's made that picture yet. No one wants to paint the curse."

"What the hell has gotten into you recently?" William said. "You're drunk all the time and you talk like Edgar Allan Poe. I half expect to see you walking the parapet at midnight with a raven on your shoulder."

"That sounds amazing. I should do that. Can we get ravens here? Can I paint a pigeon?"

"Clara."

He said her name crisply, and she sat up in mock attention.

"William," she replied.

"What is wrong with you? Why do you keep saying these strange things, like you think our family is cursed? We might be bored. We might be a little offbeat. But we're not cursed. Cursed families don't get photo essays in Life , no matter what you say. You don't need to do this spooky act around me."

" Think our family is cursed?" Clara dipped her fingers into the water. "I know it is. There's nothing magical about curses. You just do a bad thing long enough, it takes root. No magic about it. You know it as well as I do."

If William knew what Clara meant, he wasn't prepared to admit it. He turned his focus to the wreck of the Elk below them, the view wobbling in the ripples on the water.

"You're in one of your moods," William finally replied, He put on a pair of sunglasses and turned his face to the sky. Clara continued looking at the Elk down below, in the strange world under the water. Only ten feet down but in another land. You could visit, but if you stayed in it too long the current would claim your lungs and the fish would eat your eyes. Your bones would settle to the bottom and turn to silt.

William was right. She was in a mood, haunted by a thought she could not express. Her soul cried for escape—just go, drive the boat and go—but she instead took the wheel and steered them back, inevitably, to Morning House.