Eventually she slept.
When she awoke on the couch, she didn’t know how much time had passed. The storm was still brutal, the sky dark outside the wet windowpanes. She was cold but sweating. The twins were on their stomachs on the rug, watching a movie on the iPad, eating macaroni and cheese in their pajamas. The others must have gone home.
The TV was muted, showing a reporter huddled under an umbrella in the deluge. When the camera cut to a dry newscaster behind a desk, the white space next to his head filled with a block of text headed Derecho. The word was defined inside a red box: A straight swath of driving rain and wild wind usually occurring in the Plains states during the summer months. The newscaster shuffled papers on his desk, shook his head in disbelief as the broadcast cut to a commercial about a marina that sheltered boats during the winter.
On the coffee table in front of Eureka, a mug of lukewarm tea sat next to a stack of three business cards left by the police. She closed her eyes and tugged the blanket higher around her neck. Sooner or later, she would have to talk to them. But if Brooks stayed missing, it seemed impossible Eureka would ever speak again. Just the thought caused her chest to cave in.
Why hadn’t she let down the anchor? She’d heard the rule from Brooks’s family her whole life: the last person to leave the boat was always supposed to drop the anchor. She hadn’t done it. If Brooks had tried to board the boat again, it would have been an arduous task with those waves and those winds. She had the sudden sick urge to say aloud that Brooks was dead because of her.
She thought of Ander holding the chain of the anchor underwater in her dream and she didn’t know what it meant.
The phone rang. Rhoda answered it in the kitchen. She spoke in low tones for a few minutes, then carried the cordless to Eureka on the couch. “It’s Aileen.”
Eureka shook her head, but Rhoda pressed the phone into her hand. She tilted her head to tuck it under her ear.
“Eureka? What happened? Is he … is he …?”
Brooks’s mother didn’t finish, and Eureka couldn’t say a word. She opened her mouth. She wanted to make Aileen feel better, but all that came out was a moan. Rhoda retrieved the phone with a sigh and walked away.
“I’m sorry, Aileen,” she said. “She’s been in shock since she got home.”
Eureka held her pendants clasped inside her palm. She opened her fingers and eyed the stone and the locket. The thunderstone had not gotten wet, just as Ander had promised. What did it mean?
What did any of it mean? She’d lost Diana’s book and any answers it could have offered. When Madame Blavatsky died, Eureka had also lost the last person whose advice felt reasonable and true. She needed to talk to Ander. She needed to know everything he knew.
She had no way of reaching him.
A glance at the TV sent Eureka groping for the remote. She pressed the button to unmute the sound just in time to see the camera pan the soggy courtyard in the center of her high school. She sat up straight on the couch. The twins looked up from their movie. Rhoda poked her head into the den.
“We’re live at Evangeline Catholic High School in South Lafayette, where a missing local teenager has inspired a very special reaction,” a female newscaster said.
A plastic tarp had been pitched like a tent below the giant pecan tree where Eureka and Cat ate lunch, where she’d made up with Brooks the week before. Now the camera panned a group of students in raincoats standing around a balloon-and flower-strewn vigil.
And there it was: the white poster board with a blown-up photo of Brooks’s face—the picture Eureka had taken on the boat in May, the image on her phone whenever he called. Now he was calling from the center of a glowing ring of candles. It was all her fault.