Stone Cove Island (18 page)

When we reached a small, low, shingled condo building, Malloy swayed to a stop.

“It’s here,” he said, weaving unsteadily, bouncing off the beach plum hedge as he walked up the path.

Charlie turned to me.
You sure?

I nodded.

Inside, Malloy flicked on a lamp, the cheap metal kind that comes on a bendy arm so you can position it. The room had very little furniture, all of which was simple: catalogue
stuff or items from the village thrift store. The place was crammed with books. They covered every surface, stacked in chaotic towers around the room. Malloy seemed to devour them, not discriminating against any topic. Home decorating books were stacked with Restoration comedies, volumes and volumes of Dickens, pink-and-yellow-covered ACT UP manifestos from the ’80s, Greek plays, sudoku workbooks, New England histories and anthologies of poetry, unauthorized biographies of the British royal family and of androgynous ’70s rock stars.

Malloy collapsed into a faded, corduroy armchair and nodded for us to sit down too. There were no other seats. Charlie kneeled on the floor while I perched on the edge of a small, creaky table, trying not to put much weight on it. Now that he was in his own home, he seemed to sober up a little.

“You’re wearing her necklace,” he said, focusing on me for the first time since we’d left the bar.

“My mother had it. She gave it to me.” Malloy nodded, as though this made sense to him. Charlie, still wary and uncomfortable, tried to move things along.

“You said you kept something that belonged to Bess?”

“That’s right!” said Malloy, springing up from the chair as though he’d just remembered something important. He walked to a large bookcase that had been built and then added on to until it filled an entire wall. He opened the lower cabinet, dug around for only a moment and emerged with a faded manila envelope that he handed to me. What appeared to be mayhem to us was obviously as ordered as the Library of Congress to Malloy.

I opened the envelope. Inside were a series of short school papers, some typed, others handwritten, all with the name Bess Linsky in the upper right-hand corner. There was an essay on Hawthorne, one on French existentialism, Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams. Malloy had not, I noticed, changed his syllabus much over the years.

“This was what you saved? Her papers from school?”

I must have sounded disappointed, because he snapped at me bitterly, “What were you expecting? Her anchor?”

Charlie and I were both struck silent.

Malloy pressed his lips together, as though wishing to trap the words back inside, but they had already escaped. “I saved her papers, yes,” he said. “She was a good student. Not an exceptional student, but a very good one. I never go through my last term’s work until the following. After she drowned, I still had all my class’s work from the spring, so I kept hers. I thought there might be something there. Or that the police would want to see it. It was mostly superstition, though. I couldn’t throw away her thoughts, her voice. It seemed like the last thing that remained of that poor girl.”

The way he spoke reminded me of my mom, how she’d held on to Bess’s necklace once she’d found it, and somehow that had made her feel better.

Charlie took the papers from me and looked through them, one by one. “But if these are for school,” he asked, “how are they a secret?”

“They aren’t,” said Malloy. “What she told me is the secret. I don’t even know if it’s true, but it still felt like too big a risk at the time.”

We waited for him to decide to continue.

He looked away as he spoke. “She came to me during the summer. She was afraid, and maybe I was the closest person, the closest adult she felt she could talk to. I found her walking home from the lighthouse one afternoon. It must have been July. She looked … 
stricken
is the word. Under the lighthouse, she said, was a secret room. A boy had taken her there, thinking she would be impressed. She was horrified.”

“What was it?” asked Charlie.

“You asked about the anchor.” Malloy turned to him and then jerked his head at me. “That’s where they meet, the members of the Black Anchor Society. This boy had just joined. He was impressed with himself and wanted to impress her too.”

“What’s the Black Anchor Society? Not the Anchor Club?” I asked. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“No one who isn’t in it has heard of it,” said Malloy. “They run the island. They’re behind things. Bess said there were members dating back two hundred years. When someone tries to go against them, they make sure that person gets out of the way. You get the anchor and you either shut up, leave, or—”

“Worse?” I interrupted. I couldn’t help it. Charlie shot me a look.

Malloy barked a sharp rasp of a laugh. “You didn’t hear that here, my dear.”

“Did you go look for the room?” asked Charlie. “After she told you about it?”

“I looked. Not until after Bess. But then I looked and I couldn’t find it.”

“So how do you know it really exists?” I asked.

“Because someone killed her to make sure no one found out it existed.” I looked at him, suddenly afraid for him. He’d kept the secret for such a long time, and now he’d told us. What would happen to him if anyone found out?

“Can I take these and read them?” I asked, holding up the envelope filled with Bess’s papers. “I’ll bring them back after.”

Malloy nodded.

I pulled Charlie to his feet and we said good night, first asking Malloy if he needed anything. He said no. He looked exhausted now, as if he’d just survived the hurricane again. I wondered if he’d even remember any of this come tomorrow morning. Part of me prayed he wouldn’t.

Outside, the temperature had dropped. I buttoned my Katniss suede coat and set off down the path at a run. Charlie jogged after me, rushing to catch up.

“Eliza! Where are you going?”

“To the lighthouse,” I yelled behind me into the wind.

“Will you stop a sec?” Charlie called. “I feel like I’ve been chasing you all over the island tonight.”

I stopped only when I reached the lighthouse. I stared up at its black silhouette, looming against the night sky.

“Don’t you want to see it?”

“The room? Yeah, but is it a good idea to go in the middle of the night?”

“It’s a better idea than to go in the middle of the day. Especially when we don’t know who the members are, but we do know where half the island is tonight.”

He considered this. “We don’t even have a flashlight.”

“I do.” I pulled a small LED light from my quiver.

“Nice work, Katniss.”

“I need to be prepared for the arena,” I joked lamely. I caught Charlie’s uncertain eyes. “Look, if we get caught, we can always say we were going for a romantic walk on the beach.”

At that, he smiled shyly and nodded.

I’d been all over the lighthouse on the cleanup day. I could picture the ground floor in detail, and how to go up, but not how to get underneath. The ground floor was a circular concrete slab, with one door and no windows. From there, a spiral stair climbed one side of the room. About twenty feet up, tall, skinny windows started to pierce the walls at regular intervals. Higher up was the lighthouse keeper’s office, where I’d found the letter—and above that the massive light itself.

“I wonder who it was,” I mused. “The boy who brought her here.”

The door wasn’t locked. Holding my little flashlight, Charlie and I walked the inside perimeter of the ground floor, hugging the concrete wall. We found no hinged library door, no statue with a secret lever.

“What do you think?” I asked Charlie, stumped. He looked around.

“If there’s a hidden door, it’s not going to be in a slab of concrete.”

“That’s all there is though,” I complained.

“There’s the spiral stair.” He walked over to it.

“Going up, not down.”

Charlie pulled the lowest step toward him. Then he pushed it away. Nothing happened. He tried pressing and pulling on the support at the center of the stair.

“Is there a lever or something?” He shook his head. I walked over to join him. It was ridiculous. The stair wasn’t going anywhere. It was as old as the lighthouse, corroded in place, hiding no secrets. I walked around behind it and looked down, realizing that the metal base of the stair was
black, freshly painted, not rusted by a hundred years of salt air like the rest of the staircase.

“Charlie,” I said, motioning for him to come around to my side and pointing down at the metal plate. He understood right away. Together we kneeled. I held the flashlight in one hand as we felt, half blindly, for a pull, a hook or a hinge. At last Charlie managed to wedge a couple of fingers under the edge and the whole thing tilted right up. It wasn’t even that hard.

“Wow,” I said.

Underneath, the spiral stair continued down into darkness. I was less proud of my Katniss flashlight now. It was next to useless. Charlie was down the steps like a flash, light or no light. I had no choice but to follow. The stairs were a narrow continuation of the ones above. I couldn’t see where I was putting my feet so I pictured the steps I’d taken many times on the way up and tried to make my steps down the same size.

Charlie had made it to the bottom now and was feeling for a light. I ran my dim, mini-flashlight over the walls, trying to help out. He seemed to have found something because all of the sudden, the room was cast in dim, amber light.

“Okay,” said Charlie, looking around in disbelief. We were in some kind of underground cave, the walls thick stone, the ceiling heavy wood beams. There was a long wooden table that took up almost the width of the room. Two iron chandeliers hung down above it. These were the lights we’d turned on. There was nothing else in the room.

“I feel like I’m in an Edgar Allan Poe story,” Charlie said. There was no humor in his voice. He meant it.

I nodded, determined not to get freaked out when we’d made it this far. “Let’s see what we can find,” I said, my tone businesslike. In my head, I counted the chairs. Twenty. That must mean that there were twenty members, assuming they all attended every meeting. But maybe there were more, and not everyone showed up every time.

Slowly we circled the room, looking for something that could tell us more. I took a deep breath, aware of the stale air, the closeness of the room. Could these lights be seen from outside? There didn’t seem to be any windows, but the idea gave me an uncomfortable feeling. That metal trapdoor, if it shut behind us, would we be able to push it open again? Probably, unless someone put something on top of it.

“I don’t think we should stay down here too long,” I said, suddenly jittery.

“I know,” said Charlie. “But it may not be so easy to come back. Let’s see what we can find. We’ll be quick.”

I made another circle of the room, then held my hands up in defeat. Charlie was crouched at one end of the table, examining the underside.

“Anything down there?” I asked. We were talking in whispers.

“No,” he said. “But look. There’s a seam across the middle.” There was, running across the short side. “Eliza, get on the other end and pull.” We each took an end and pulled, but the table wouldn’t budge.

“Is there anything along the underside on your side? I feel something over here. It feels like a tab that pulls out.”

I felt along my side and found the same.
How dumb
, I
thought.
Dad makes tables like this all the time that come apart so you can add leaves
. Why didn’t I think of that?

“So, hold that, and let’s both pull.” This time, the table slid apart easily, revealing a lower surface. Laid in four even rows under glass were black and white photographs. They were lit formally, like portraits, but they were of men’s hands instead of faces. In each picture, one hand was crossed over the other. The hands were all the hands of young men, but the pictures were obviously taken at different times. Some seemed new. Others looked like they could be fifty years old. We stared at them.

“Do you think those are all victims?” asked Charlie in a horrified voice.

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

I pointed at one of the pictures. “Because these are my father’s hands.” I showed Charlie the crescent-shaped cut across my dad’s left hand—that place where a hammer had made its mark, just missing his head. Here in the photograph, the injury was still new, darker than the skin around it instead of whiter, as his scar appeared now. “These are the members.”

“Anyone look familiar to you?” I asked.

Charlie shook his head. I knew he was looking for his dad. “But it’s hard to tell from these pictures.”

“I think that’s the idea.” I leaned across the middle of the table to get a closer look and the surface moved under me. “Look, Charlie. There’s another layer.” We pushed, and the layer with the photos rolled to the side. Underneath was a deep wooden box. In it was a large, black
anchor, about the size of Salty, too big to pick up or move. I reached inside to touch it, then pulled my hand back.

“Charlie!” I shrieked. “Oh my God.”

The box was about half filled with short locks of hair. I felt sick. Charlie put his hands on my shoulders to steady me as he looked in.

“Okay, calm down. Take some deep breaths. We know practically everyone on the island. They aren’t serial killers. They aren’t in a cult.”

“How can you be sure?” I whispered. My voice sounded like a stranger’s in my ears. I felt sick.

“I’m sure. Maybe this is part of their initiation.”

“What about Bess? Her hair was cut off.”

“Her hair was found with her clothes.”

“All of it?” I pressed.

Charlie didn’t answer. He couldn’t. After a minute, he said we should close the table up and get out of there. He was trying to appear unfazed, but I could see his hands were trembling.

“I don’t want to go home,” I said. “I don’t want to see my dad.”

“That’s fine. We won’t go home. We can see if the diner’s still open. If it’s not, we’ll go to the Little Kids’ Park.”

We turned the lights off, first making sure we hadn’t left any signs that we’d been there. I fought off wave after wave of nausea as I focused on making it back up the steps through the dark. Suddenly I didn’t want to know more, didn’t want to find out what happened to Bess, didn’t want to find out how my parents might have been involved.