“Look, Henry, I don’t think you understand how bad this is. When I rowed him back, I thought he’d go straight to you. I think I disappointed him somehow. He said he’d come to the wrong person.”
At least we agreed on something. But that didn’t get us any closer to finding Grant. He hadn’t come to me, and I hadn’t worried about it at the time because whenever he went missing he was always with them.
Ahead of us, Pixie’s smelly dog sat perfectly still, waiting for instruction. Was this new? I don’t remember Patience being so attentive before. Usually she just peed on everything and harassed squirrels until Pix whistled for her.
The dog was waiting for something. Something big. So was I.
“We already looked all over for him,” Pix said.
“When?”
“When he didn’t show up at five thirty, trying to avoid the six o’clock ferry.”
Yeah. None of us liked going back to the mainland after two days of freedom. Grant hated it most of all. To him, Useless Bay wasn’t just a retreat and the Grays’ house wasn’t just some broken-down rambler. It was an extension of the beach—a world filled with treasures and things of wonder, as though the Grays and all the creatures of the bay were conjured from one of Lyudmila’s books of Russian folktales, where poor men talked with fish and bridegrooms danced with bears.
The wind blew the hood of Pixie’s raincoat down, and her golden hair swirled around her face.
In that moment, I wondered if there was something to the urban legends about the Grays. Like the one that said they had been carved from glaciers.
Or that they had been built for a purpose.
Or that they were a sign from God.
Or the spawn of Satan.
The most broadly whispered question was: Who was their father?
No one had ever seen or heard of a Mr. Gray. The most likely theory was that he was an officer stationed temporarily at the naval base at Oak Harbor, good for one night, and that he didn’t even know this brood of giants existed.
At that moment, watching the weather swirl about Pix but not affecting her, I felt something different. I wondered if the Grays weren’t from any father so much as they were from the land itself—a long cold beach where it seemed you could walk forever and keep walking. A handy breed to be called up in times of crises.
The question was: Would this be one of those times? Were we in a crisis now?
It was then that I began to think beyond the pain in my face and that Dad might need the sheriff for more than to harass the Gray family. He might actually have to find my little brother.
Something might have happened to Grant. Something bad. Maybe my misdirection at the Grays’ house was a stupid thing to do, because maybe my brother was really in trouble.
The important thing now was to get him back, and Pix was starting to convince me that it might be harder than I thought.
“Do you hear it?” Pix said.
“What? The wind?”
She shook her head. “Listen. I mean, really listen.”
She closed her eyes and turned her face to the beach.
Even her dog—the smelly, loud one—was so silent she seemed reverent. It was like being in church.
So I closed my eyes and listened, too.
The first thing I heard was my homework list, then the little ways I’d let everybody down—as well as the bigger ones. The mistakes I’d made in the past, the ones I’d make in the future, and how I could possibly avoid them.
When I was done with those voices, then came the rip and groan of the storm, and the snore of the barn owl that seemed to be demanding, “Treat! Treat!”
But Pixie seemed to be hearing something else, something deeper. She shivered in her Windbreaker, and I couldn’t understand why.
“All I hear is the wind,” I said.
“Oh,” Pixie said, disappointed. “Right. The wind.”
I felt as though I’d failed some kind of test I didn’t even know I was taking.
“If Grant’s really gone, we should find Yuri. He’ll know what to do,” I said.
Yuri’s shack was at the beach end of the trail that we were on—the one that shored up and bisected the lagoon.
“Right. Yuri,” Pixie said, and she seemed to shake off something that had settled around her shoulders like a mantle. If I didn’t know her and her brothers better, I’d say that she was afraid.
Even though Grant went missing all the time in circumstances that sometimes seemed even worse than this, and he had his elaborate games of hide-and-seek that often involved the Grays—who, I had to admit, took pretty good care of him when he ran off—it never made me nervous. But this was the exact moment I began to worry.
I mean, really worry.
Grant’s disappearance was a different kind of deception.
five
PIXIE
All Henry had to say was “Yuri” and Patience forgot to stay. She shot off down the trail as though she’d been fired from a cannon. Oh boy oh boy oh boy we’re going to find things!