Ten (10 page)

“What I don’t understand,” Ben started, “is why now?”

T.J. glanced at Meg. “Something, um, must have triggered it.”

“Maybe,” Vivian said with a shake of her head. “But why come to a house party if you were depressed and planning to kill yourself?”

“Too bad it wasn’t you,” Kumiko muttered to Meg’s left.

“Huh?” Vivian asked.

“Nothing.”

Nathan shrugged. “Seems as good a place as any. I mean, if that’s your thing.”

If that’s your thing
. Like suicide was a thing. A quirk. A personality flaw.

“We need to figure out what we’re going to do now,” Ben said, then took a bite of his doughnut. Like Minnie, Lori’s death hadn’t affected his appetite. Wow, they
were
the perfect couple.

“Maybe there’s a generator in the house,” Nathan suggested.

“We already searched for one, Gunner and me,” T.J. said. “Nothing.”

Nathan slouched in his chair. “Damn.”

“We should wait for Jessica to get here,” Vivian said. “Then we can have the ferry call the police.”

A massive gust of wind rocked the house, sending a shudder from the foundation to the roof.

“I think,” T.J. said after a pause. “I think we need to face the fact that Jessica might not be coming.”

“What?” Minnie said through a mouthful of bagel. “What do you mean, not coming?” She dropped the half-eaten food to her plate. “She has to come. She has to. Meg, she has to come. You promised.”

Meg was having a hard enough time keeping her own fear in check. The idea of calming Minnie felt like trying to scale Mt. Everest barefoot.

Thankfully, Ben stepped in. “It’s going to be okay,” he said, and rested a hand on top of Minnie’s.

“There’s the boathouse,” Gunner said. That was all. He didn’t elaborate.

“Gee, thanks for that,” Vivian said.

Kumiko immediately came to his defense. “Oh, yeah, Miss Brilliant? If there’s a boathouse there might be a boat. And a boat probably has a radio.”

“A radio?” Meg sat bolt upright.

“Yeah,” T.J. said. “All vessels have a Marine VHF radio.”

“Do you know how to use one?”

T.J. nodded. “My uncle owns a fishing boat. I used to work for him during the summer.”

Meg glanced at Minnie. Her mood seemed to have recovered since Lori’s body was interred in the study, but how long would it last? Without her antidepressants or her antianxiety meds, it was only a matter of time before a serious meltdown occurred. Like Chernobyl serious.

She had to avoid that. At all costs.

T.J. seemed just as eager to check out the radio. “Let’s go, then.”

“All of us?” Minnie asked, glancing at the raging storm outside.

“Nah.” T.J. winked at Meg. “I’ll just take Meg.”

“Oh.” Minnie stared straight ahead of her, not looking at either of them.

Ugh. Even with Ben around, Minnie was still territorial over T.J. Just one more reminder of why Meg had to get over him.

T.J. definitely wasn’t reading her mind this time, though. “Come on, Meg,” he said. “Throw on your raingear and let’s go.”

FOURTEEN

MEG RAN UP THE STAIRS TO THE GARRET AND
sifted through the mess for her boots and raincoat. Her heart pounded in her chest, but it wasn’t from the mad dash up the stairs. She was in decent enough shape to handle that. She was excited, plain and simple.

T.J. wanted her help.

Stop it
.

Meg sat down on the side of her bed and pulled on her rain boots. The hardened look on Minnie’s face flashed before her. She had to control her feelings for T.J. Had to. Minnie would never forgive her if she found out, and besides, she was going to Los Angeles, starting fresh.

Except T.J. would be in LA too.

What is wrong with you?
It was like her brain was trying to sabotage her. She’d made a decision on Homecoming night. She and T.J. would never happen. She needed to stick with that. Besides, once he got to USC, he’d be an even bigger rock star than he was in Mukilteo. He’d have hot LA girls swarming all over him. Celebrities, probably. Didn’t USC football players always date celebutantes? It was part of their contract or something—full scholarship, plus a Kardashian as a girlfriend. He wouldn’t even remember Meg. She’d be a speed bump on his road to fame.

She just had to get through this weekend. Find a radio, get off the island.
Move on.

Meg got to her feet and searched around for her coat. She found it on top of the dresser where Minnie had launched it during her madcap search of the room. Meg pulled it down and started to put it on when something caught her eye.

Sitting on the dresser was a framed photo of a girl.

Meg didn’t recognize the photo at first. It seemed so incongruous, so out of place in that room. The pale skin, the look of sadness on her face, the stringy hair that hung in front of her face like a tattered curtain. Black hair. Black and foreboding.

It dawned on Meg slowly, like a fog clearing from her mind. She knew this girl.

It was Claire Hicks.

Holy shit. Claire Hicks? What was a photo of Claire Hicks doing in her room?

Questions flooded her mind.

Had the photo been there when they arrived?
Meg tried to remember. She’d come up the stairs the first time and been so dazzled by the garret room, maybe she hadn’t noticed. No, that was stupid. A thick black frame around a photo of Claire Hicks? She’d have remembered that.

Okay, but if it wasn’t there last night,
how did it get there?
Obviously it didn’t appear out of thin air. Someone had to have put the photo on the dresser.
Who?
Ben and Minnie had been up there for an hour or so, but in the chaos of the morning, anyone could have been in the garret. It would have been pretty easy.

Which led to the most important question:
Why?

There was the mundane answer, of course. It had fallen behind the dresser and someone, maybe Minnie or Ben, found it there and put it back. Logically, it made the most sense. But even if that were true, Meg returned to her initial reaction:
Why was there a photo of Claire Hicks in her room?

Meg stared at the photo. Claire. She looked so much like the creepy dead girl in
The Ring
that Meg was more than a little afraid that Claire was going to crawl out of the picture frame into the room.

Which made it even more disturbing that her family had used that photo for her obituary.

Why, why, why was it in her room? Claire wasn’t related to the Lawrences in any way. If anything, Jessica Lawrence and her circle had avoided Claire like the plague. They weren’t openly hostile, and honestly, it wasn’t like Claire needed any help ostracizing herself at school. She had transferred to Kamiak at the beginning of fall semester, and within weeks of her arrival, rumors were flying. Accidents seemed to happen to people who were mean to her.

Bobby Taylor had a car crash two days after purposefully tripping Claire in the hall. Afterward he swore up and down that his brakes had failed.

Tiffany Halliday cut herself on a jagged piece of metal hanging from her locker a week after someone circulated a Photoshopped picture of Claire around Facebook. She got this weird infection from it and spent two weeks in the hospital getting transfusions. Meg remembered the blood drive and the scary days when no one was sure if Tiffany would make it. She did, thankfully, and the police declared the whole thing an accident.

After that, everyone pretty much left Claire alone. Even the teachers. And Claire seemed to like it that way, which is why even though she was a freaking mess, it was a complete surprise when she was found hanging from the ceiling fan in her bedroom the day after Homecoming.

Now another suicide by hanging. And there was Claire’s photo looking out at it all in this big creepy house in the middle of nowhere. Was it supposed to mean something? Maybe Lori had put the photo in their room while they were sleeping? Was she somehow connected to Claire?

Meg shook herself. She was letting her imagination take over. Stupid. She needed to stay calm, go with T.J. to check out the boathouse, and hopefully find an easy way off Henry Island. It was going to be fine.

With more force than she intended, Meg flattened the frame against the dresser. She was about to leave when she noticed some writing on the back of the picture frame. With one finger, she spun the frame around so she could read the words.

They were written in red ink:
I will repay.

What in the hell did that mean? Someone’s idea of a practical joke, no doubt, but things were officially getting a little bit too weird. She backed her way out of the room until she felt the lip of the first stair, then turned and ran down as quickly as her boots would allow.

T.J. was waiting for Meg at the bottom of the stairs. “What took you so long?”

“S-sorry,” Meg stammered. Her mind raced. Lori’s death. The photo of Claire. The mysterious red slash and the freaky DVD. Were they all just coincidences or were they somehow related? And if so, how?

T.J. stepped in front of her. “Are you okay? You look …”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Kind of shaken.”

Meg raised an eyebrow. “You think?”

“I meant,” T.J. said with a sigh, “you know, something other than Lori.”

Meg opened her mouth. She wanted to tell T.J. about the photo of Claire, but she stopped. He’d changed out of his pajamas and into jeans and a thick cable-knit sweater under his raincoat. Meg even caught a trace of aftershave. Meanwhile, she’d tucked her flannel pajama bottoms into her rain boots and thrown a coat over her sweatshirt. She hadn’t even run a brush through her hair or put it up in its normal ponytail. She must have looked like some dorky tween just up from a slumber party … who was about to go down to the boathouse with a hot boy. Alone.

Wow. She was such an idiot.

Nope, she wasn’t going to say anything. More than likely, her imagination was just running rampant again. The last thing she needed to do was make herself seem like any more of a silly little girl envisioning monsters in the closet. Yeah, that would send him running.

“You’re lost in your head again,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she lied.

“Good. Come on.”

They turned toward the foyer, but T.J. immediately paused. It was like he didn’t want to pass by that slash on the wall. Meg didn’t blame him, and she secretly rejoiced when instead of using the front door, T.J. headed down the hall, through the living room. They passed Kumiko and Gunner spooning on the couch, and Nathan flipping through a magazine on the window seat, but no one said a word. In the kitchen, Vivian leaned against the counter sipping a room-temperature Diet Coke.

“You’re going down to the boathouse,” she said simply.

“Yep.” T.J. opened the door to the back patio. “With any luck, we’ll find a radio.”

“Right,” she said with an arched brow. “The radio. I’m sure that’s all you’re doing down at the boathouse.”

“It is,” T.J. said flatly. “Come on, Meg.”

Vivian followed them to the patio door. “Are you
sure
you know how to use one?”

She just could not stop micromanaging, could she?

T.J. ushered Meg through the door onto the patio. “Yep.”

Vivian took a few steps toward them. “Maybe I should come with you just in—”

“Nope,” he said with a smile, then closed the door in her face. “Damn, that girl is a pain in the ass,” he said under his breath.

“Understatement of the century.”

T.J. opened the door that led to the backyard, exposing the full force of the storm. Sheets of rain obscured the view of the trees beyond the yard, and the temperature was at least twenty degrees colder than it even was in the heatless house.

“Stick with me, okay?” T.J. said. “The path down to the boathouse is kind of treacherous.”

Treacherous? Great. “I’ll try.”

“Ready?” T.J. buttoned his coat up to his chin, whipped his beanie out of his pocket, and pulled it down to his ears.

Meg lifted her hood over her head. “Ready.”

T.J. dashed down the steps into the rain. With a deep breath, Meg followed.

FIFTEEN

THE GROUNDS AROUND WHITE ROCK HOUSE WERE
a muddy mess that sucked at Meg’s boots as she trekked across the yard. It felt as if she were slogging through ankle-deep sand, and it took twice as much strength as usual to put one foot in front of the other. The wind was even more brutal than it had been the night before, gusting across the island, trying to uproot every tree and topple every structure in its path. Towering Douglas firs cowered before the tempest, and though Meg should have been able to hear the shuddering branches and the waves crashing against the rocks below, the only sound in her ears was the relentless, howling wind.

Meg struggled to keep up with T.J. He was at least six inches taller than she was, and his star-football-player legs had no trouble driving through the muck of the yard. He reached the tree line a full thirty seconds before she did and hardly seemed to notice when she plodded up behind him.

He stared off to the right and Meg followed his eye. Cutting through the forest was a series of wooden walkways leading down the side of the hill. They were the same kind as the footbridge that had been washed off the isthmus. The beams were rough and water-damaged, their once-brown wood now grayed and pitted with age. T.J. stepped on the first deck and tested his weight against its solidity. The walkway bounced a little, but it appeared sturdy and sound.

“Should be okay,” T.J. shouted through a wall of rain. He grabbed her hand and led her down through the trees.

The walkways were slanted and uneven—some took ten steps to traverse, others took three—and even the rubber grip on the bottom of Meg’s boots had a difficult time retaining traction on the waterlogged planks. Meg tried not to let her eyes stray over the side of the hill, where a steep drop-off ended on the jagged rocks below.

Maybe this trip to the boathouse wasn’t such a good idea. Rickety wooden land bridge? Check. Storm of the century? Check. Certain death at the hand of the rocks on the beach? Check and mate. Just like Nathan’s painfully racist joke last night: This was how horror movies started.