I run a finger over a row of books on the bookshelf beside the fireplace. The spines are printed with titles like Native American Legends of the Northwest, How to Break an Unwanted Curse, and Witches and Warlocks: A Guide to Understanding. They are all like this—a library of books on topics of the unnatural, the mystical, similar to what’s happening in Sparrow. Collected by someone and stored in the cottage . . . but who?
“You didn’t know?” Bo asks. Coffee begins streaming into the glass pot behind him, the warm roasted scent filling the room.
I shake my head. No, I didn’t know these were in here. I had no idea. I sink down onto the couch, touching the page of a book left open on one of the cushions. “Why are you reading them?” I ask, closing the book with a thud then setting it on the coffee table.
“I don’t know. Because they’re here, I guess.”
Olga hops down from the couch and coils herself around Bo’s leg, purring up at him, and he bends down to scratch gently behind her ear. “And what about the Swan sisters—do you believe in them now?” I ask.
“Not exactly. But I also don’t believe people drown themselves for no reason.”
“Then why are they drowning?”
“I’m not sure.”
My foot taps against the floor, my heart thuds inside my rib cage—a scratching at my thoughts. So many books. All these books. Placed here—hidden in here. “And what about the singing from the harbor—how do you explain that?”
“I can’t,” he answers. “But it doesn’t mean it won’t eventually be explained. Have you seen those rocks in Death Valley that move across the desert floor on their own? For years people didn’t understand how it happened. Some of the rocks weighed over six hundred pounds, and they left trails in the sand as if they were being pushed. People thought it might be UFOs or some other bizarre cosmic event. But researchers finally discovered it’s just ice. The desert floor freezes, and then strong winds slide these massive boulders across the sand. Maybe the Swan sisters’ legend is like this. The singing and the drownings just haven’t been explained yet. But there’s some perfectly logical reason why it happens.”
The coffeepot has stopped sputtering behind him, but he makes no move to walk back into the small kitchen.
“Ice?” I repeat, looking at him like I’ve never heard anything so absurd in my life.
“I’m just saying that maybe someday they’ll discover that none of this has anything to do with three sisters who were killed two hundred years ago.”
“But you’ve seen firsthand what happens here; you saw Gregory Dunn’s body in the harbor.”
“I saw a body. A boy who drowned. That’s it.”
I tighten my lips together. My fingernails dig into the fabric edge of the couch. “Did you really come to Sparrow by accident?” I ask—the question piercing the air between us. Splitting it apart. It’s been nagging me since he showed up, a needle at the very base of my neck, a question I’ve wanted to ask but felt I shouldn’t. Like the answer didn’t matter. But maybe it does. Maybe it matters more than anything else. There’s something he’s not telling me. A part of his past or maybe his present, a thing that rests between the ribs, a purpose—a reason why he’s here. I sense it. And although I don’t want to push him away, I need to know.
The sunlight through the window spills over half of his face: light and dark. “I already told you,” he says, his voice sounding a little hurt.
But I shake my head, not believing. “You didn’t just come here by accident, because it was the last stop on the bus. There’s another reason. You’re . . . you’re hiding something.” I try to see into his eyes, into his thoughts, but he is carved by stone and brick. Solid as the rocks bordering the island.
His lips part, his jaw tenses. “So are you.” He says it quickly, like it’s been on his mind for a while, and I shift uncomfortably on the couch.
I can’t meet his eyes. He sees the same thing in me: a chasm of secrets so deep and wide and unending that it bleeds from me like sweat. We both carry it. A mark on our skin, a brand burned into flesh from the weight of our past. Perhaps only those with similar scars can recognize it in others. The fear rimming our eyes.
But if he knew the truth—what I see what I peer through Olivia Greene, the creature hidden inside. If he knew the things that haunt my waking dreams. If he saw what I saw. If he saw. He’d leave this island and never come back. He’d leave this town. And I don’t want to be alone on the island again. There have only ever been ghosts here, shadows of people that once were, until he arrived. I can’t lose him. So I don’t tell him.
I stand up before our words tear apart the fragile air between us. Before he demands truths I can’t give. I never should have asked him why he came to Sparrow, unless I was willing to give up something of myself. Otis blinks at me from the gray cushion, stirred by my movement. I walk past Bo to the door, and for a moment I think he’s going to reach out for me, to stop me, but he never actually touches me, and my heart wrenches. Spills onto the floor, seeps into the cracks between the wood boards.
A burst of bright morning sun pours into the cottage when I open the door. Otis and Olga don’t even attempt to follow me. But before I can pull the door closed behind me, I hear something in the distance, beyond the edges of the island. There is no wind to carry it across the water, but the stillness makes it audible.
The bell at the marina in Sparrow is ringing.
A second body has been found.
TAVERN
The Swan sisters were never ordinary, even at birth.
All three were born on June first, exactly one year apart. First Marguerite, then came Aurora a year later, and Hazel the year after that. They did not share the same father, yet fate would bring them into this world on precisely the same day. Their mother had said they were destined for one another, bound by the stars to be sisters.