Twelve

Whatever happens, at least we won't starve. Living on an island means learning to stockpile food, because if you run out of something, you're not hopping in the boat to get it. In my locked storeroom, I have canned food, dried food, and a rotating stock of nonperishables.

When I'm here writing, I don't want to leave for anything. That might explain the massive bags of coffee beans and chocolate bars. I keep the kitchen stocked with the basics for guests—everything from flour to tea to spices—though admittedly, I don't actually use the same stuff myself, being a paranoid bitch. I'd rather switch out the opened jar of cinnamon in the cupboard for the one in my storeroom.

Guests also leave food. If it's unopened, that's fine—the next guests can use it—but one of the problems with renting to rich people is that they leave everything, sometimes with little notes like "Help yourself!" on a bag with two broken Oreos at the bottom. Surely the cleaner will be happy for those broken Oreos and stale bread, right? Saves the renters from adding to the trash they need to take with them.

This time, there's a lot of unopened food, because the Abbases understandably didn't pause to empty the fridge before they fled. I feel terrible about that, but on the other hand, I'm glad they ran when they could. At least they didn't end up like Nate.

End up like Nate.

I'm trying to wrap my head around that. We jumped on Garrett's explanation earlier, and that's partly because that made more sense. If someone wants my island cheap, they might resort to desecrating a corpse. But murdering my cleaner?

"Could the kid have been in on it?" Garrett says as I cook bacon and eggs, and we all pretend it's just an early morning on the island, and there's no killer lurking in the forest beyond, no mutilated body stuffed in a crevice.

When we all turn to face him, he raises his hands. "I'm not trying to speak ill of the dead. I'm not even blaming him. If I really needed to escape a shithole town, no matter how much I liked my employer…" He shrugs. "He was still working for rich people, and that's gotta sting."

"He was working for Laney," Madison says. "Not Kit."

I shake my head. "I understand where you're coming from, Garrett, and I don't want to be the clueless boss convinced her employees all love and respect her, but I would like to think if Nate was in trouble, he'd come to me." I flip the bacon. "And maybe even saying that makes me a clueless boss."

"He wasn't like that," Madison says, her voice low. "He really wasn't."

"I don't know Nate either," Jayla says, "but that might make me a better judge of the situation. This doesn't sound like a kid who'd screw Laney over. What if he made a mistake? Agreed to something and regretted it? Or agreed to something without realizing what they were up to? He finds out the truth, they fight, he dies, and they use his body. That's horrifying, but is it possible?"

"Maybe?" I say.

I take the bacon out, leaving two slices that I keep cooking for Kit. I do it automatically, and then I find myself staring into the pan. Am I ever going to forget how he likes his bacon? His eggs? Toast? How he takes his coffee?

As a newlywed, I'd made a point of remembering all that. We didn't have years of dating to fall back on, and I wanted to show him that remembering these things mattered to me. Now he's gone, and the memories stay, and I'm not sure what to do with that.

Well, for starters, I could not think about it right now, when we're trapped on an island with a killer.

Ah, but it's so much easier to dwell on bacon, isn't it? Not to think of what happened to Nate and whether he could have been desperate for money, not feeling like he could come to me, while knowing, even if he did, I might not have been able to help.

I crack eggs beside Kit's bacon.

"Could you, uh, tell what happened to him?" Jayla asks. "That might help us know what we're dealing with. Whether it was an accident or… Not that I expect you to have been examining his, uh, body. I just meant whether you saw something."

"I didn't," I say.

"I looked," Garrett says. "As best I could, while I was down there. The obvious damage was…" He coughs.

"His hand. But that didn't kill him," I add quickly, before inserting any horrific images in Madison's head. "It was removed postmortem."

"Which means, yes, his death could have been an accident," Jayla says. "That absolutely does not excuse what those bastards did, but if that's what happened, then while they might have stuck around to stage his hand, they're long gone now. Back to civilization, where they're waiting for Laney to decide she wants to sell."

Kit takes an unopened loaf of bread and feeds slices into the toaster.

Jayla's theory makes sense. It would mean there isn't a killer out there. Everything is fine.

Everything is sure as hell not fine. Nate is dead, his body desecrated, and we're on this island with a storm approaching. But if we're on this island alone, that's the important thing right now. I haven't brought Madison onto the island with a crazed killer. Kit and I will paddle to shore, and everything will be as fine as it possibly can be.

After breakfast, Kit and Jayla insist on cleaning up, which I suspect means they want to talk. Garrett goes on patrol, stalking through the house, checking doors and locks. Madison and I wander to the far end of the great room, where two chairs look out at the view. They don't quite fit with the rest of the layout—and the interior designer had been horrified—but this is my favorite and most-used spot, where I curl up and write when it's too chilly to work on the deck.

The other chair had been Kit's. Now it's Madison's, and she takes it, pulling her legs in under her.

"You okay?" she asks.

I choke on a small laugh. "That's supposed to be my line."

"You're the one who found… him."

I sober and nod.

She switches position, pulling her knees to her chest as she stares out at the rocky beach and water beyond, her gaze saying she sees none of that.

"I liked him," she whispers.

"So did I. I liked him a lot. He was…" My voice catches. "He was a great guy, and I admired the hell out of him."

"Same," she says, her voice still soft. "But I mean… I liked him."

I glance over. "Oh."

Her cheeks color, and she pulls her knees in tighter. "Remember when you and Kit brought me here at the beginning of the pandemic? When Nate came for a few visits? He was cute and nice and smart and…" She swallows. "I really liked him, Laney. He was the first guy I ever thought of that way."

She shifts again. "I think he knew, but he never did anything. He just kept on being nice to me, and it wasn't weird or awkward, and that just made me like him more. Lots of guys would have…" She shrugs. "Taken advantage. Or backed off. He didn't. I dreamed that maybe, someday, when I was a bit older…"

Her cheeks redden again, and I reach over and take her hand, and we sit there, staring out the window and thinking about a boy who'd deserved every good thing life had to offer… and got none of it.

By the time Kit and I head out, it's dawn. We leave the others to secure the house behind us.

"I keep wanting to say I'm sorry about all this," Kit says as we make our way over the rock. "I know it sounds trite, and I just…" He throws up his hands. "I don't know what else to say."

"It's okay."

"No, it's not okay. Someone targeted you. Hell, I might have sent them your way. They contacted me, and I passed them to you without a second thought."

"Uh, because you presumed they were normal people interested in a normal property purchase. This?" I wave back at the house. "This is a million miles beyond normal."

"Is it?" He stuffs his hands in his pockets. "I should know, right? This is my world. I grew up in it. I live in the center of it now."

Not by choice. Taking over the family business wasn't what Kit wanted. As a kid, he'd dreamed of starting a band. When he was older, he realized he'd only make a living in music if his parents bankrolled him, and he sure as hell wouldn't allow that. So his next "dream" was a whole lot like mine, oddly enough.

Or maybe not so oddly, but rather another thing that drew us together. I dreamed of being a writer and became an English teacher to earn a living. He dreamed of being a musician and planned to become a music teacher to earn a living. As undergrads, we even shared teaching-college information.

Neither Kit nor Jayla ever intended to go into the family business, and they had the kind of parents who were absolutely fine with that. His mom had a brother not much older than Jayla, and he'd been working for the corporation since he graduated college.

That uncle died in a car accident six years ago. Then their dad had two heart attacks in a row, the second one scary enough that both parents decided it was time to retire. Jayla was in law school, and that left Kit. Oh, no one expected him to take over the business, but his family needed him, so he said he'd decided he didn't want to teach, joking he didn't much like kids anyway—such a lie—and he threw himself into the job of CEO. That means he does know this cutthroat corporate world, better than he ever wanted to.

"People do shit like this," he says as we walk along the rocky beach. "I've seen them do things that should earn a one-way ticket to a locked ward for sociopathy, and instead, they're admired for their ‘guts,' for their ‘business savvy.'" He shakes his head. "I knew those things happen, but I didn't think twice about passing developers on to you."

I reach over to rub his back, the gesture automatic. Then I pull back, hands going into my pockets. "It's not the same. If I were selling a corporation, you'd have been wary. This is a summer house."

"I'm still sorry."

"I know."

"And I'll stop moaning about it now. That's the last thing you need." He glances over. "Hey, did I tell you I learned some new sea shanties?"

I sputter a laugh. "Everyone else moved on from that mid-pandemic, Kit."

"I am not everyone else. And I know how much you loved hearing me sing them. I wrote one, about a fair maiden who waves her beloved off to sea, promising she will count the moments to his return… and then runs inside, pulls on her yoga pants, and binge-watches true-crime shows. Want to hear it?"

"I kinda do."

"Good, because either way, you're going to hear it. Over and over, while we row for shore. To keep our spirits up." He lifts his hands. "Don't thank me. It's the least I can do."

"Torturing me with sea shanties?"

"Yep."

I won't mind.The thought comes in a very small, quiet voice. I won't mind at all.

I'd loved the sea-shanty phase, because it came at a time when Kit was overwhelmed with work, grinding through his days, the two of us barely exchanging five sentences between breakfast and a dinner that came so late I was often in bed before he ate.

I'd played a couple of sea shanties from the internet, alone in my office, struggling to get through my own days of online teaching, and he'd come in during one and asked me to replay it. Soon we were spending lunches together, Kit with his guitar, riffing on shanties, as silly as he could make them.

We found time, Kit. Even in the midst of all that, we found time to be together and have fun and push the world away for a little while. So what happened?

We continue along the beach until I veer inland. To get to the secondary boathouse, we need to pick our way through a thick barrier of trees, half of them dead and gnarled. The building appears ahead, tucked into that gloomy forest.

The best thing I can say about my private boathouse is that it's upright. Pretty much upright, anyway. I'd bought it from a Fox Bay local who was planning to haul it away to the dump, and I'd paid for him to bring it out here and put it back together. It's weathered, with peeling paint that I keep meaning to redo as a summer project with Madison, but when we're up here together, we're too busy paddling and exploring and reading and lazing the days away. Important stuff, for both of us.

I'm also not in a rush to paint the shed because I'm hoping it's a temporary structure. The watercraft should all be stored in the boathouse, which is modern and gorgeous and designed for, well, holding boats. There's plenty of room; Kit had the builder put in berths for our personal watercraft. Yet I'd quickly discovered that no amount of polite signs—or clauses in the rental agreement—kept people from taking them out on the water. It isn't a matter of "don't touch my stuff"—it's a matter of "I don't want you getting killed by touching my stuff." I only discovered renters were ignoring my request when anglers picked up a near-hypothermic guest stranded on my paddleboard.

This isn't a little forest pond. It's Lake fucking Superior. I'm tempted to have people sing "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" before they get the keys to the boathouse. If a freaking carrier ship can go down, taking the entire crew with it, they shouldn't be trying out my damn paddleboard for kicks.

Seeing the boathouse, Kit frowns. "Not to be critical but…"

"It's a piece of shit that ruins the aesthetic of the island?"

"I'd never say that. Madison told me you had to slap something together fast to keep renters from using your stuff. Which is fine, and yes, it's not the prettiest thing, but if you decide to keep renting, and it bothers you, you'll replace it. Otherwise, none of my business. I'm just surprised by the location."

"Fifty feet from the actual shore? Near a crappy sliver of beach covered in sharp rock shards?" I waggle my brows. "Think of it as my piranha-filled moat."

He hesitates and then smiles. "Renters don't venture out here. Which means they don't find the shed."

That's the idea, but they've broken the lock twice. I don't say that—I just nod. We cross the last ten feet. Then we're at the doors, barn-style ones that should open onto the water, but if I had it on the shoreline, people would definitely try to get access.

I spin the combination on the first lock.

"Two locks?" Kit says. "Has someone broken in?"

"I'm just making sure they don't try," I lie.

I get both locks open, swing the doors wide and—

"What the hell?" Kit says.

He brushes past me as he strides into the boathouse. I can only stare, certain I'm seeing wrong, wanting to be seeing wrong. Kit grabs a battery-operated lantern and shines it around the gloom.

Destroyed.

My boats. Our boats. They're…

We aren't taking these to shore.

We aren't taking them anywhere.