Thirteen

“Gale, like a storm blowing off the sea,” Iris said. “She guarded me and Hayley in the attic.” She let out a breath. “He hardly ever called her by name, as if he didn’t want us to know too much.”

“What did she call him?” Matt asked.

“I don’t remember ever hearing her call him anything.”

“Okay,” I said quickly, not wanting to break the stream of whatever memories were trickling back. “Just keep going. You said she guarded you.”

Iris closed her eyes, and I didn’t know if it was because she was trying to bring Gale’s face to mind, or to block it out.

“She did what he told her, but sometimes he did what she told him. Like I told you, she had her own bed, a nice one. And my sister and I had mattresses on the floor.”

“She slept in the same room as you?” I asked.

Iris frowned. “Some nights. Not always. And it wasn’t sleep. It was?.?.?.?She kept dying. Then coming back to life.”

“What?” I asked. A chill went through me.

“That’s too creepy to be real, right?” Iris asked. “I must have dreamed that.”

I held back from saying yes. It was way too creepy.

“Tell us more about her,” Matt said. “The things that are real, not dreams.”

“I couldn’t tell if she was a girl he’d kidnapped, like us, but who got on his good side. Or whether she was in on it from the start, because they were definitely a team,” Iris said. “Whenever she spoke to us, she would whisper, as if she didn’t want him to hear.”

“Was he always there?” Matt asked.

“No, and that’s another strange thing. It seemed as if he was spying on us, even when he wasn’t in the room?.?.?.” Iris trailed off. “He slept in the building.”

“Building? Not a house?” I asked.

But she didn’t answer.

“What kinds of things would Gale say?” Matt asked. “When she whispered?”

“I remember once she said, ‘I’m sorry for everything. It’s my fault you’re here.’?”

“Did she explain that?” I asked.

Iris seemed drifty for a few moments. “No. She told me to stay positive, that he’d eventually let us go. She said that the other girl’s death had been an accident, it wouldn’t happen to us.”

“What other girl?” I asked, the top of my scalp tingling. Eloise?

Iris kept talking, as if she hadn’t heard my question. “I tried to have as positive an attitude as possible—for Hayley’s sake. I was trying to keep my sister’s spirits up, so we could stay strong and escape when we got the chance.”

“I can imagine,” I said.

“Sometimes I felt bad for her—for Gale.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Her eyes looked sad. She looked tired all the time. Obviously because she didn’t sleep well, she?.?.?.”

My stomach clenched, because I had the feeling Iris was about to say “died” again. It was too upsetting to consider. But instead, she went in another direction.

“She hardly ever spoke,” Iris said. “She didn’t smile a lot, and seemed to be kind of curled in on herself. You know? Her shoulders were always hunched over, as if something inside really hurt.”

“Like she’d been injured?”

Iris shook her head. “No. More like her heart ached.”

That rang a bell with me. Since losing Eloise, there were times I couldn’t stand up straight. My heart had been bruised the day my sister went missing; when I found out she was dead, it completely shredded. Even now, if I heard her name, my shoulders instinctively curved forward, my whole body making a protective little cave around my broken heart.

“It sounds as if she’s mourning someone,” I said.

“I don’t know,” Iris said. “She was always exhausted, and sometimes she got sick. I’d hear her throwing up in the bathroom. I said to her one time, ‘You’re sick because of what he’s doing to us. Keeping us here.’?”

“What did she say to that?”

“Nothing. But I could tell that what I said really bothered her. She got even more hunched and left the room. I almost felt bad for her. But, see, she could come and go. She had control—we had none.”

I tried to imagine Gale’s role in what had happened to Iris and Hayley—and to Eloise, because I was convinced that my sister had to be “the other girl” that Gale had referred to.

“And what was the room like?” I asked. “Can you remember?”

“It was in an attic,” she said. “But, like an extra-high attic or something. I was out of it when we got there, but the drug was starting to wear off when he jostled me out of the van. We had to go up a bunch of flights. Four, I think. You could tell it was a very old place—the rafters were splintered, and the nails were that rustic, iron kind that you see in museums about New England history.” She glanced at me. “And, Oli, there were dead birds.”

“Like in your dream.”

“Yes. Mostly owls. Dead, stuffed, with their wings out like they were flying—suspended from the ceiling. Hanging up there, dangling over our heads.”

“With dolls’ eyes,” I said, remembering what she had said.

I pictured being at the birding station. I loved birds so much, and I tried to imagine the kind of person who would kill them, take them to a taxidermist, and hang them from the ceiling.

“There were windows,” Iris continued. “But they were so old and dirty, we couldn’t see out. A big chimney stood in the center of the room. Or maybe just a brick enclosure. He went inside it sometimes, through a splintery old door that was set into the brick. Also, there were those strange painted panels, leaning against the walls.”

“Like in the ghost signs?” Matt asked.

“Yes. Those same three classical-looking girls,” Iris said. “The Sibylline sisters in those draped white gowns, with flowers in their hair, carved marble columns behind them.” She paused, frowning.

“What?” I asked.

“Obviously Gale’s nightgown was modeled on their dresses.” She shrugged and went on. “Once, the guy was standing in front of the panels, and I heard him say ‘hella-spon-teen.’ Or something like that. Then something that sounded almost like ‘arithmetic,’ but not quite. ‘Aritherin’? A foreign language, I thought. And he said the words in an almost reverential way, as if they meant something very important to him.”

“Who is a ‘hella-spon-teen’?” I asked, pulling out my phone and typing it phonetically into the search window.

Nothing with that spelling came up, but it autocorrected to Hellespontine . When I looked that up, it said she was an ancient Greek sibyl along with two others, Phrygian and Erythraean .

“Wait, could ‘arithmetic’ have been ‘Erythraean’?” I asked. “Sounds similar.”

“Yes, that’s it!” Iris said.

I passed her my phone, to show her the painting of the three sibyls that had popped up in the search. Their long white dress were ethereal and delicate, but they had sharp intelligence in their eyes that left no doubt they were women to be reckoned with. Iris peered at them, nodding her head. “These are similar to the ones in the attic,” she said. “Not by the same artist, but definitely the same subjects. Sibyls?.?.?.?what are they?”

I took my phone back and skimmed the screen. “According to this article, they’re women who are oracles,” I said, and suddenly it seemed obvious. “The Sibylline sisters!”

“The ghost-sign girls!” Matt said.

“They can tell the future?” Iris asked. “Isn’t that what oracles do?”

“Yes, according to this article,” I said, looking at my phone.

“Do you think the guy who took you drew the paintings? Or did Gale?” Matt asked.

“No, the panels were really old,” Iris said. “They looked almost like stage sets, as if they’d been in a theater at some point?.?.?.” She trailed off, and I noticed her voice and energy draining away.

I looked at the time on my phone. It was three in the afternoon. Hard to believe that only a day and a half had passed since I had found her in the ground.

I saw her yawn widely and touch her head.

“You’re doing great, Iris,” I said. “I can’t believe how much is coming back.”

“I have this bizarre feeling,” she said in a strained whisper, pressing against her temples with her fingertips. “Almost as if I’d been in a hospital, or a clinic. With a band put around my head. Or electrodes or something—attached with that sticky stuff. Like, testing my brain.” She yawned again. “I’m really tired and I can’t think anymore. I feel as if I’m going to fall asleep.”

“Of course,” I said worriedly. “You didn’t sleep well last night.”

She nodded. “I just need a nap—I’ll curl up like a cat and be ready to go when I wake up.”

“You sure?” I asked.

“Yes. Sleep fixes everything,” she said.

Inside the warehouse were some lifesaving packets, kept aboard the patrol boats. I got one packet and tried to tear it open. The wrapping was too thick, so Matt handed me his Swiss Army knife, and I cut it open. I shook out the thin red blanket that was inside and spread it on the ground under a tree. There were also bottles of water and power bars inside the packet, and we shared them.

Iris nibbled on a power bar, then lay down on the blanket. Within a few minutes she had fallen asleep, and I covered her with another blanket from a second lifesaving pack. I glanced over at Matt and saw him texting. But when our eyes met, he put his phone into his pocket. We walked to the other side of the shed so we could talk and not wake Iris up. We sat really close together, leaning against a pile of lobster pots.

“I haven’t known what to say to you for a long time now,” he said. “Ever since Eloise disappeared.”

“People don’t know what to say,” I said. “And when they do, I don’t want to hear it.”

“I’m not exactly ‘people,’?” he said.

“I know.”

The way he was gazing into my eyes made me feel like crying. I’d been on my own with everything until now—Eloise’s death, finding Iris in the woods, not knowing what was going to happen next.

Matt’s blue eyes reminded me of summer skies. His expression was so warm it pulled me even closer to him, so I was almost leaning against his shoulder. I thought back to one night last September, when we’d started a tennis match. We had played on the old courts at Hubbard’s Point, without lights, until well after the sun had gone down. We played through dusk, into the dark, till we couldn’t see anything. We were just friends, that’s all we were, but it was as if our rackets were magnetized to the ball, or that we were to each other.

I felt that way now.

“Life is hard without her,” Matt said.

“For you, too?” I asked, tilting my head to look at him.

“Yeah. She’s your sister, and you two did everything together. But your happiness spread to all of us—to me. When I think of you without her?.?.?.”

I waited for him to finish that sentence, but it seemed he couldn’t. He cleared his throat and looked away.

“Sometimes I wonder what it’s like for you,” he said. “Without her here?”

I closed my eyes. These were not the normal questions people, even close friends, asked. People wanted to know how she died, who found her, what they did to her, whether we got a ransom note. They wanted to know the kinds of details you would read about in a mystery novel, or see on a true crime show. This question was different enough that I felt like answering.

“Lots of times I feel her with me,” I said. “In certain places.”

“Like where?”

“On Dauntless Island. In the Braided Woods. Or at home, sitting on the couch.” I touched the back of my wrist, then the back of my neck. “I’ll feel something right here, not quite a tickle, more like the lightest breeze moving across my skin. I know it’s weird, but I’m sure it’s her. I’m not just imagining things.”

“I don’t think it’s weird,” Matt said. “I’d be surprised if you didn’t feel her nearby. How can she really leave?”

“Because she’s dead,” I whispered, and hot tears scalded my eyes. In New London, thinking of ghosts, I had known that Eloise was now among them. The sea breeze swirled around us, smelling of salt air, seaweed, and lobsters. The scents of our childhood, my sister’s and mine.

“I think she’s here right now,” Matt said. “Because she knows you need her.” He was leaning so close to me, our foreheads almost touching. I felt lightheaded—was he going to kiss me? I thought back to our almost-kiss at Ocean House last summer.

I had wanted to kiss Matt for so long, but my emotions were crashing through me, as if I was a human earthquake. It was all too much; I couldn’t help it, I did that hunching thing with my shoulders and my heart. I looked down at his hands.

Matt wore a Turk’s head bracelet—we’d all learned how to make them in sailing class a few summers ago. It was a three-strand braid of narrow white cord, woven into a mysterious knot that seemed to have no beginning and no end. Once you made the bracelet and put it on, you secured the strands until they were pretty tight, but loose enough to not cut off circulation. You didn’t take it off. You swam with it on, showered with it on, slept with it on.

But Matt saw me looking at it. He tugged on it, working it free, loosening the bracelet enough so he could slide it over his hand. Then he reached for my left hand and slipped it onto my wrist.

“You need this,” he said.

“I do?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. He held my hand, laced his fingers with mine. “It’s a talisman. To make sure everything works out.”

“Finding Hayley, you mean?” I asked, looking into his blue eyes.

“That and other things,” he said softly, squeezing my hand. “You know about the bracelet, right? It’s also called a sailor’s knot.”

Sailor’s knot. I felt a shiver run through my body, but in a good way this time. Mariners out on a ship for months at a time used to make sailor’s knots for the ones they loved. Then, when they left land and returned to sea again, the bracelet was a romantic reminder that the sailor’s love was strong, and absence was only temporary.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You don’t have to thank me,” Matt said. “It’s just how it is.”

“How it is?.?.?.” I said quietly.

“You know what I mean, right?” he asked.

“I think so,” I said. My heart was pounding. His eyes held a secret message. Was I reading it right? Did he feel the same way about me as I felt about him?

“I’ve wanted to give you the bracelet,” he said. “But I never pictured doing it like this.” He glanced back toward where Iris was sleeping.

Iris. I wanted this moment to last forever, but we couldn’t get offtrack. I knew, better than anyone, that this situation was life-or-death. I reluctantly pulled my hand away.

“What is our plan?” I asked. It was hard to switch my thoughts from him putting the bracelet on my wrist to plotting our next move.

“We have to call the cops, Oli. No matter what Iris says.”

It was amazing how quickly Matt and I went from that incredible moment, in our own little world, into a different mode. I still felt the magic of the bracelet on my wrist, but now we had a job to do—a mission.

“That’s what I thought at first,” I said. “But Iris convinced me that it would be too dangerous. They swore they’d kill Hayley. She won’t even let us take her to a clinic.”

Matt took that in. “Let’s try to convince her when she wakes up, okay? And meanwhile I’ll call Fitch again. If he doesn’t pick up, we’re driving over to see him. Iris doesn’t seem okay to me. It could be an emergency.”

“I agree,” I said.

I took a breath as Matt pulled out his phone. I touched the bracelet again, and in spite of everything, I felt my entire face beaming in a smile I couldn’t begin to hide.

“Good,” Matt said. His smile was as big as mine. I loved the space between his front teeth. It was so Matt. His blue eyes locked with mine as he called our friend.