Ten (13 page)

“It didn’t just get there on its own,” Kenny said, backing up his friend.

Kumiko wasn’t so easily convinced. “Then where’s the paint? If she’d just painted the wall, she’d still have a brush and a can or something.”

“She could have stashed them after she used them,” Nathan said. He wasn’t giving up his case.

“Then why would she come back to the scene of the crime, moron?” Ben asked. “Just to throw you off?”

“Well … um …” Poor Nathan. He clearly hadn’t thought things through.

“Besides,” Ben continued. He walked behind Meg and gestured to the trail of dirt and water she’d left as she came into the house. “She’s dripping wet and covered in mud. Clearly her footsteps stop right where she’s standing. She never went anywhere near the wall.”

Meg could have hugged him.

“I guess,” Nathan grumbled. He sounded less than convinced.

“Wait,” Kenny said, looking around. “Where’s Vivian?”

“And T.J.?” Minnie added.

Crap. As scared as Meg had been to tell everyone about Vivian before, the second slash mark made it even worse.

“There’s …,” she started. She looked from face to face. How would they take this? Would they blame her? “There’s been an accident.”

T.J. had managed to get Vivian’s body pretty well covered by the time Meg led the rest of the group down the side of the hill. He’d anchored the tarp with heavy rocks from the shore and tucked the sides down beneath the log onto which she’d fallen. Nathan and Kenny insisted on seeing the body for themselves, and Meg wasn’t sure if it was because they didn’t believe she was dead or didn’t believe she’d died as the result of an accident. Either way, the two of them traipsed down the muddy hill and T.J. carefully pulled the tarp away. From where Meg stood on the walkway, she couldn’t see the body, but the shocked, drawn looks on the boys’ faces reminded her only too well of what they found underneath.

Meg was the last one to climb back up the walkways to the house. She lingered behind, not wanting to partake in the inevitable conversation happening ahead of her. The deaths, the slash marks, the fact that they were currently cut off from the rest of the world. She didn’t need to hear it again. Even the relentless rain was preferable.

Once again, she paused at the spot where Vivian must have lost her footing and fallen to her death. It seemed so pointless, so preventable. Her eyes traced the broken railing. If only it hadn’t been raining, or the railing hadn’t been so freaking old. It must have been rotted to have given way like that. Without thinking, Meg bent over to examine it.

While the one side of the wooden railing had been splintered by the impact of Vivian’s body, the other side, the spot right at the turn in the walkway, was broken cleanly most of the way through, then, just at the back, looked as if the wood had snapped. There was a vertical groove that permeated almost all the way through the beam. It was clean and man-made.

As if someone had taken a saw to it.

Oh my God.

The railing had been cut intentionally.

Meg reared back. Half of her wanted to tell someone about her discovery, but would they believe her? Nathan was still convinced she’d painted the second slash on the wall, and if this discovery meant what she thought it did …

“You okay?”

T.J. stood on the platform above her. She beckoned him over. “Look at this.”

T.J. carefully picked his way down the precarious walkway to the broken railing. “Isn’t this the same spot you almost fell?”

“Yeah.” Meg pointed to the broken railing. “And check this out.”

T.J. bent down and examined the splintered wood. “She must have slipped too, only there was no one here to catch her. How horrible.”

“But look,” Meg said, tracing the saw mark with her finger. “That’s no accident.”

T.J.’s fingers grazed against Meg’s as he felt the vertical cut. “You think someone did this on purpose?” he said after a moment.

“Maybe?” Meg was suddenly nervous, afraid of saying exactly what she thought.

“It could still have been an accident,” T.J. said, his eyes fixed on the broken railing. “Someone could have been doing repairs and just forgotten to finish this section.”

“Do you think we should tell someone?”

T.J. stood up suddenly. He gazed down at the tarp that covered Vivian’s body, then up to the house. Finally, his eyes rested on Meg. “Not yet,” he said. “Let’s wait and see what happens, okay? I think everyone’s on edge. This might make it worse.”

“Okay.” He was right, of course. After Nathan’s reaction over the last red slash, Meg was pretty sure he’d be accusing her of cutting the handrail as well. Still, it seemed weird not to say something. Maybe if they figured out a way to contact the police, she could mention it.

Meg shivered.
If.

“Come on, let’s get you inside.” T.J. guided her up the walkway toward the house. “You need some dry clothes.”

Meg’s skin was icy cold by the time she reached the garret. She stripped off her coat, then her sweatshirt, and kicked off her boots and soaking-wet pajama bottoms. She pulled her journal out of her pocket—dry, thankfully—and tossed it on the bed while she dug through a pile of her clothes and grabbed the warmest items she could find. Jeans, a long-sleeved shirt with a sweater over it, thick socks, coat, and her fingerless gloves. She couldn’t find her brush so she borrowed Minnie’s and dragged it through her wet hair, pulling it up into a high ponytail.

Meg lingered in the garret. She didn’t want to go downstairs. By the time she and T.J. made it back to the house, everyone had gathered in the living room to discuss what they should do next. But after her discovery on the walkway, she kind of wanted to squirrel herself away in the garret until the ferry came back the next morning. Despite T.J.’s conviction that the whole thing was a tragic accident, the details surrounding Vivian’s death nagged at her. Was it
really
an accident? Or could it have been intentional?

She was overreacting. There could have been other reasons for the man-made damage to the handrail. Like T.J. said, maybe the Lawrences had been doing repairs to the walkway last time they were at the house, and that section was left unfinished. That made sense. They might not even have known the railing was damaged.

But what about the paint?
That was a problem she couldn’t explain away. There had been red paint in the closet of the
Nemesis
. It had been removed recently—like within the last twelve hours—and there were red paint slashes on the wall of the foyer. Two of them. Both corresponding to deaths. Someone had known that both Lori and Vivian were dead before their bodies were discovered by everyone else.

Someone knew they were going to die.

Meg leaned against a window sill and stared out into the cloudy grayness. She felt knotted up inside, a mix of fear and apprehension and disbelief. Her mind raced. Was she really suggesting that Lori and Vivian had been murdered? Or at least that someone had known about their deaths and not told anyone? It was ludicrous. Wasn’t it?

And yet there were two deaths. One might have been a tragedy, but two? She couldn’t believe Vivian’s death was just an accident. Not with the sabotaged handrail. And the slashes. Even if Lori had painted the first slash herself as some sort of morbid “screw you” to the world, who made the second mark?

Something had been off ever since they arrived on the island. Meg had tried to ignore it—the strangeness of the guest list, Jessica’s absence, and then that creepy nonsensical DVD. The DVD … Meg recalled the conversation Lori and Vivian had after the video ended.
Someone’s out to get us. I know what you did.
Lori and Vivian had been talking about something or someone, an incident at school that no one else knew about. What if they were connected?

Meg pulled away from the window and sat down on the edge of the bare bed. She desperately wanted to talk to someone about it, but bringing all of this up in front of everyone downstairs seemed about as appealing as walking through a field of broken glass barefoot, and T.J. thought she should keep it to herself for now. Still, her mind raced. She needed to organize her thoughts.

Without thinking, she reached out a hand for her journal.

The moment she held it in her hand, Meg realized something was wrong. She always kept a thin silver pen tucked into the journal. But it was gone. No bulge between the pages. She gazed down at the black fake-leather book and though it looked exactly like her own journal, the cover was more worn, more aged in a way Meg couldn’t quite put her finger on. Kind of prematurely old. It felt heavy, brittle, like a book that had been dropped in the bathtub then left to dry out in the sun for a month. The attached ribbon bookmark hung in tatters between the pages, sticking out the bottom like a splayed peacock’s tail, and the whole thing smelled musty.

One thing was for sure—it definitely wasn’t Meg’s journal.

Two thoughts jumped into her mind. Where the hell was
her
journal, and how did this one get in her room? She glanced around the disaster that was the garret—her journal must be somewhere in the mess. And this one was probably in the room, left there by a former resident or guest, and Minnie had uncovered it in her mad search for her meds.

Meg wanted to put the book back in a drawer. As a fellow journaler, she felt a pang of guilt about reading someone else’s private thoughts and hidden secrets. She imagined the horror she would feel if someone found and read her own journal. The mere idea sent chills down her spine. So on that level, she wanted to shove the old diary back into the drawer where it had sat for who knows how long gathering dust and hoarding its secrets. She wanted to leave it alone. She wanted to walk away.

She didn’t.

I’ll just read the first page
, Meg said to herself.
To find out who the owner is. No harm in that.

Meg furtively glanced around the garret to make sure she was still alone, then sat on the floor beneath a window where there was enough muted light to see words on a page. It was like a forbidden book. Meg desperately wanted to open it.

It must be older than it looked. So old, the owner had probably forgotten it even existed. The author had left it here, after all. It couldn’t have been that important to him. Perhaps he was dead and gone by now. That meant it was okay to read, right? Kind of like posthumously publishing someone’s letters. Really, there was no harm in just peeking at the first page and seeing who it belonged to. No harm at all.

Meg took a breath and opened the diary.

Is this book yours? No? THEN STOP READING IT. NOW.

The words were centered on the title page, written in red ink. It should have been ominous. It should have kept Meg from turning the next page.

Not so much.

Seriously. I’ll find you and hurt you.

Meg laughed out loud. Not that the words were funny, or the intention, but she had this flashback to an old picture book she used to love as a kid, where Grover from
Sesame Street
is trying to keep the reader from turning pages because there’s supposed to be a monster at the end of the book. Of course, as a child she had a fiendish delight in continuing to turn the pages, despite Grover’s preventative measures such as ropes, two-by-fours, and brick walls. Apparently things hadn’t changed much in ten years.

The third page had a single line of text.

And their
doom
comes swiftly.

The words seemed familiar to Meg but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. A line of poetry maybe? Shakespeare? Crap, she should know it. Whatever it was, the author of the journal seemed passionate about it. The word “doom” was underlined like three times, and it looked as if the author had gotten increasingly excited with each repetition: by the last underline, the pen dug into the paper so fiercely it actually marred the next two pages in the diary.

Okay. Crazy much?

“What are you doing?”

Meg started at the voice, whipped her head up from the journal, and cracked her skull against the wall. Her vision blurred for a split second, then as it cleared, she saw Minnie’s head and shoulders poking up from the floor, her lower half hidden on the stairs.

“Nothing,” Meg said. She slapped the journal closed, feeling very much like she’d been caught doing something naughty.

“Oh.” Minnie didn’t look like she bought it. “You need to come downstairs. We’re trying to figure out what to do.”

“Okay.” Meg stood up, furtively dropping the journal into her coat pocket as she pulled it on. There was nothing she wanted to do less than go down and face whatever conversation was going on, but Minnie was right. She needed to be there. She needed to be present.

The mysterious journal could wait.

NINETEEN

A MODEST BLAZE CRACKLED IN THE FIREPLACE
, which made the living room the warmest spot in the house. Some of the chairs and the large sofa had been dragged in front of the fire, and everyone sat around talking. Meg entered quietly and stood near the window, half hoping no one would notice her.

“And no one saw anything?” T.J. said. He leaned against a bookcase with his hands shoved deep into his pockets.

Minnie curled up on a sofa next to Ben. “
We
,” she said emphatically, “were together up in the tower. Didn’t see anything.”

“You were the ones outside, dude,” Nathan said. Meg didn’t like his accusatory tone.

“Down at the boathouse,” T.J. said. “You can’t see the path from down there.”

“What was there to see?” Kumiko said. “Vivian slipped and fell. It was an accident.”

“Whatever,” Nathan said. “I’m tired of just sitting here talking about it.”

“What do you suggest we do?” T.J. asked.

Nathan bounced his leg furiously. “I think we should try to get across instead of waiting around for another ‘accident.’”

Nathan’s inflection on the word
accident
made Meg flinch. Did he suspect there was more going on too?