When I meet her eyes, she’s looking at me like I’m a stranger, a girl she no longer recognizes. Not her daughter, but merely a memory.
“Why don’t you read the leaves anymore?” I ask, rinsing out the mug and watching the amber tea spiral down the sink. I know this question might stir up bad memories for her . . . but I also wonder if talking about the past might bring her back, shake her loose from her misery.
“Fate has abandoned me,” she answers. A shiver passes through her, and her head tilts to the side like she’s listening for voices that aren’t really there. “I don’t trust the leaves anymore. They didn’t warn me.”
The old silver radio sitting on the kitchen counter is still on—I never shut it off before I fell asleep last night at the table—and music quietly crackles through the speakers. But then the song ends and the announcer promptly returns. “She has been identified as Gigi Kline,” he is saying. “She left her home on Woodlawn Street on Tuesday morning and hasn’t been seen since. There is some speculation that her disappearance may have something to do with the Swan season, but local police are asking anyone who may have seen her to contact the Sparrow Police Department.”
“Do you know Gigi?” Her voice shakes as she asks it, her eyes penetrating the radio. The announcer repeats the same information again then fades to a commercial.
“Not really.” I think of Gigi spending the night inside the boathouse, probably hungry and cold. But it’s not Gigi who will remember being tied to a chair; only Aurora—the thing inside her—will recall these frigid, shivering nights for years to come. And she will probably seek her revenge on Davis and Lon—if not in the body of Gigi Kline, then next year, inside the body of another girl. Assuming they let Gigi go eventually, and Aurora is able to return to the sea before the Swan season ends.
“When your father disappeared, they announced it on the radio too,” she adds, walking to the sink and staring out the window, pushing her hands down into the deep pockets of her robe. “They asked for volunteers to search the harbor and the banks for any sign of him. But no one came out to help. The people in this town never accepted him—their hearts are cold, just like that ocean.” Her voice wavers then finds strength again. “It didn’t matter, though; I knew he wasn’t in the harbor. He was farther out at sea—he was gone, and they’d never find him.” This is the first I’ve heard her speak of him as if he was dead, as if he wasn’t ever coming back.
I clear my throat, trying not to lose myself in a wave of emotion. “Let me make you some breakfast,” I offer, walking past her. The sunlight is spilling across her face, turning it an unnatural ashen white. I open a cupboard and set one of the white bowls on the counter. “Do you want oatmeal?” I ask, thinking that she needs something warm to shake off the chill in the house.
But her eyes sweep over me and she grabs on to my wrist with her right hand, her fingers coiling around my skin. “I knew,” she says coldly. “I knew the truth about what happened to him. I always have.” I want to look away from her, but I can’t. She’s looking through me, into the past, to a time we’d both like to forget.
“What truth?” I ask.
Her dark hair is tangled and knotted, and she looks like she hasn’t slept. Then her eyes slide away from mine, like a patient slipping back into a coma, unable to recall what had stirred them from unconsciousness in the first place.
Gently, I pull my arm away from her, and I can see that she’s already forgotten what she said.
“Maybe you should go back to bed,” I suggest. She nods, and without any protest, she turns and shuffles across the white tile kitchen floor, out into the hall. I can hear her slow, almost weightless footsteps as she makes her way up the staircase and down to her room, where she will likely sleep for the rest of the day.
I lean against the edge of the counter, pinching my eyes shut then opening them again. Against the butter-yellow wallpaper on the far wall of the kitchen is a distorted, stretched-out shadow of me, formed by the morning sunlight spilling in through the window over the sink. I stare at it for a moment, trying to match up elbows and legs and feet. But the more I look at the gray outline against the sun-bleached daffodil wallpaper, the more unnatural it seems. Like an artist’s abstract sketch.
I push away from the counter and head for the front door. I can’t get out of the house fast enough.
*
The skiff floats perfectly still against the dock. Not a ripple of water or gust of wind blows across the harbor. The sun is hot overhead, and a fish jumps from the surface of the water then splashes back into the deep.
I’ve just begun untying the boat and tossing the lines over the side when I sense someone watching me. I whip around and Bo is standing on the starboard side of the sailboat—the Windsong—one arm raised, holding on to the mast.
“How long have you been out here?” I ask, startled.
“Since sunrise. I couldn’t sleep—my mind wouldn’t turn off. I needed to do something.”
I imagine him out here, climbing aboard the sailboat, the sun not fully risen, checking the sails and the rigging and the hull to see what’s still intact after all these years and what will need to be repaired. His mind working over the problems—anything to keep him from thinking about yesterday at the boathouse, about last night in his cottage. I have to stop them from killing anyone else, he had said to me. A promise—a threat—that he would find his brother’s killer.
“Are you going into town?” he asks, his jade eyes shivering against the early sunlight.
“Yeah. I have to go do something.”
“I’m coming with you,” he says.
I shake my head, tossing the last rope into the bow of the boat. “I need to do this by myself.”
He drops his arm from the mast and steps over the side rail of the sailboat then hops down onto the dock in one fluid motion. “I need to talk to that girl in the boathouse—Gigi,” he says. “I need to ask her about my brother, see if she remembers him.”
“That’s not a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“Olivia might be waiting for you.”
“I’m not worried about Olivia.”
“You should be,” I say.
“I think I can resist whatever powers of seduction you think she has over me.”
I let out a short laugh. “Have you been able to stop thinking about her since she touched you yesterday?”
His silence is the only answer I need. But I also feel a sharp stab in the core of my heart, knowing he’s been thinking about her all night, all morning, unable to shake the image of her. Only her.
“You’re safer here,” I tell him, stepping onto the skiff as it begins to drift away from the dock.
“I didn’t come here to be trapped on an island,” he says.
“Sorry.” I start the engine with a swift pull on the cord.
“Wait,” he calls, but I shift the boat into gear and pull away from the dock, out of reach.
I can’t risk bringing him with me. I need to do this alone. And if Marguerite sees him in town, she might try to take him into the harbor, and I don’t know if I can stop her.