I get a taxi home using money I’ve stolen from Mum’s purse and get my headlamp and my watch. There’s no time to fetch my wetsuit from the boathouse. I run the whole two miles to Sandwich Cove without stopping once. When I get there, I’m exhausted but I don’t wait to recover. I strip down to my top and underwear and brace myself for the pain of the freezing water. The rocks spike into my hands and feet as I crawl over the rock pools. The sky is clear and there’s a chill in the air even though it was so warm before the sun went down. I comfort myself by reciting Eddie’s jokes. I remember one about angelfish—it keeps me motivated and helps ease the pain. Finally I’m underwater. I can’t feel a thing. My headlamp flickers, lighting up the mollusks on the walls for a second before plunging me into darkness. Damn. The battery is dying. I wiggle the lamp and the light comes on again. I just need it to last a few more minutes. My brain is telling me to swim fast and get the T-shirt, but I go carefully so I don’t bump into anything. My heartbeats slow down as I count them. Navigating my way in is easy. I know that once I get around the corner, I have to force myself down another meter and then kick hard to get to the top. When my ears pop, I know it’s time to kick. One, two, three, four, five—and I’m bursting through the surface.
I suck the stale air in as fast as I can, and then I pull myself out of the water and onto the rock. My headlamp shines down on my feet. They’re covered in blood from brushing against jagged rocks.
Oxygen gradually flows back through me as I climb the steps and edge my way across the narrow ledge to the throne. I reach in and feel the cool stones against my fingers. At first I pick them up slowly, feeling the weight of each one before dropping it into the water below. Then I grab the stones by the handful and fling them down, the popping echoing all around the cavern. There are so many stones, way more than I remember, and I have to balance on the side of the wall to reach into the bottom of the bowl. Finally I feel material in my fingers.
The T-shirt is hard and damp. In the darkness it looks gray, and for a second I think I’ve got it wrong and I’m relieved. But then I notice the lion. There’s no mistaking that this is Eddie’s T-shirt. I feel sick to think that I touched it back in June and thought it was just a piece of sea junk. I shudder as I remember Danny’s face the last time I was here in the cave. White, like he’d seen a ghost, right at the moment when I was up here looking at the stones. He must have something to do with this. Now I get why Danny was behaving so oddly that day: not wanting to go into the cave at the last minute, telling me to stay close to him. I was right; he was afraid—but not of the cave, of me finding something.
The words of Tay’s note roll around in my head. D, I need to talk to you about what happened that day. Tay.
D. D for Danny. Was this note meant for Danny, not Dillon? No, that doesn’t make sense.
With a spinning head and a pounding heart, I clutch the T-shirt and pencil jump off the ledge, praying that I don’t get lost on the way out. The water crashes around my head.
I’m back there again, the day Eddie died.
The wheels spin as Mum’s car screeches to a halt in the beach car park, sending stones and grit into the air. I run to the driver’s door and open it and hug her before she even has her seat belt off. She smells of salt and seaweed. Her white top is covered in chocolate cake mix.
“I came as soon as I got the call. Where is he?” she asks. “Have they found him?”
She fumbles with the seat belt, and as she swings her legs around, a piece of dried seaweed flies from her shoe and lands on the policeman behind me. He shakes his leg to get rid of it and then offers his hand to help her out of the car.
“Mrs. Main?” he asks. “We’re still searching for your son.”
She sounds like a dying cat in a faraway alleyway. The policeman leads her down to the beach. Her bare arms are pale and goose bumpy and I want to run to her and throw my coat around her. I follow them, silently, wondering if they see me or if I am missing too.