by Meg Cabot
“Ow.” I rubbed my arm. “That hurt.”
“Sorry,” Kayla said. But she didn’t look sorry. “Impulse control issues. What do you think I’m in New Pathways for, anyway? Be happy I didn’t hit you in the head with a fire extinguisher. So does he have a girlfriend, or not? I can’t imagine he doesn’t, a hottie like that.”
“Frank most definitely does not have a girlfriend,” I said. “Why should I be happy you didn’t hit me in the head with a fire extinguisher? You didn’t actually do that to someone, did you?”
Kayla, looking pleased to hear the information about Frank, reached into her bag for her lip gloss. “Yeah, I did,” she said, casually. “My older brother. He’s an addict.”
“Kayla,” I said, my eyes widening.
She shrugged at her own reflection. “He used to beat my mom up when she wouldn’t give him money for drugs. That’s why I understand all that stuff Alex was saying back there … his anger, anyway, about what the Rectors are doing, if it’s true. My mom tried everything with Julian. Rehab, wilderness camps, therapy. Sometimes I wished he’d get arrested, just so he’d leave Mom alone. The only thing that worked, in the end, was when I went at him with the fire extinguisher, because I came home one night and found him choking her on the kitchen floor.” Her grin was lopsided. “Now I’m the one stuck with the impulse control label. Go figure.”
“Oh, my God,” I said, my heart wrenching with pity for her. “Kayla, I had no idea.”
“It’s cool,” she said airily, but I could tell that it wasn’t … not really. “Julian moved out to Wyoming to find himself. And Mom’s engaged to one of the EMTs who was on the scene that night. He’s a good guy.” Kayla looked at me very seriously. “But I just want you to know, that stuff Alex said about Seth’s dad? I think it could be true. Not just twenty years ago, either, but now. My mom’s an emergency room nurse here — that’s why we moved to the Keys in the first place, she goes where the jobs are — and she is raking in the overtime, which should tell you something. Why are so many people on an island this small having to go to the ER all the time? There’s something wrong with this place — really, really wrong with it. And I’m not talking about this Coffin Night stuff. My mom says Police Chief Santos tries to keep it out of the papers so the tourists don’t see it, because that would be a major blow to the island’s primary source of income. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.”
I knew Kayla was right.
I also knew what was wrong with Isla Huesos had nothing to do with Seth Rector’s father possibly running a major crime operation. It had to do with the place being overrun with Furies and sitting on top of a big, fat underworld.
I couldn’t admit that out loud, though, because no one — not even Kayla — would believe me.
Instead I said, “Thank you for telling me all that, Kayla. It means a lot. Alex is lucky to have a friend like you, even if it seems like he doesn’t appreciate you.”
“Well, I wouldn’t want him to do anything stupid, either, that might get himself into trouble, like …” She looked down at me. “Well, no offense, chickie, but like you.”
“Thanks,” I said, with a dry smile.
“Because Seth and his friends … they’re no angels, Pierce.” Kayla’s voice roughened. “Do you have any idea the kind of stuff they call me in the halls because of these?” She pointed at her chest.
Kayla’s air of self-confidence, I realized in that moment, was just that … an air, an act she put on like the costume she’d worn to Coffin Fest. But she had more reason to believe in herself than any of those stupid A-wingers.
“Kayla,” I said. “I hope you know you’re beautiful, inside and out. Anyone who can’t see that isn’t worth your time.”
“I hope you’re not referring to Frank,” she said. She held up her compact to give her hair one last finger-comb. “He better see how beautiful I am. And not just on the inside.” Then she looked at me and grinned. “I’m kidding. But I’m serious about the fact that if something bad were to happen to Seth and those guys, I wouldn’t mind. Any more than I’d mind if something bad were to happen to Seth’s dad, if it turns out what Alex is saying is true about him.” Her expression grew solemn. “But I don’t want to see Alex get hurt. So whatever you need me to do, chickie, just ask. He’s a dork, but he’s cute. Adorkable, I guess, is what he is.”
I smiled at her. “I agree,” I said. “Thanks, Kay —”
The door to the ladies’ room finally opened, and the person who’d been inside for so long came out. It was the singer who had been performing with the musicians on the stage outside. She was even more glamorous up close than she’d looked from far away….
“Hello, darlings,” she said, giving us both a gracious smile. “So sorry.” Then she glided past, her hips swinging provocatively beneath her tight dress, her perfume wafting in a soft cloud before her and after her.
“Wow,” Kayla said, when the singer was gone.
“That’s an understatement,” I said with a smile. I snatched up my book bag. “I’ll be right back.”
I hurried into the ladies’ room, locking the door behind me. As in the lobby, the décor was old-fashioned, with an emphasis on antique wood. There was even a small stained-glass window — in the design of a leaping dolphin — towards the top of the eight-foot ceiling that had been left partly opened.
I stuffed my soiled dress into the pedestal sink as soon as I’d stepped out of it, then turned on the tap. That’s how anxious I was to get the smell of paella off me.
Then I realized this made no sense. I was in such a rush to get back to John, however, I hadn’t really thought through what I was doing.
Oh, well. I had the white dress I’d taken from my closet with me in my bag. It had better not be too wrinkled.
I knelt down on the cool tiled floor, beginning to rifle through the things in my bag, so quickly that some of them spilled out. The dress was wrinkled, but not too badly. I put it on then reached for my hairbrush.
That’s when I saw it … the book Mr. Smith had loaned me on the history of Isla Huesos. It had fallen out of my bag and onto the tiles, open to a page of illustrations. One of them was a portrait of a man in a high collar and side whiskers whose name, according to the bold print underneath, was William Rector.
Rector? Was there no escaping this family?
I laid aside the hairbrush and lifted the book, scanning the page opposite the illustration for the name Rector.
There it was. William Rector — surely Seth’s great-great-great-grandfather, as the resemblance was startling — had, according to A History of the Isle of Bones, run the most successful shipwreck salvage business on the island in the 1830s, all the way up until October 11, 1846, when he’d died in the Great Hurricane.
The importance of shipwreck salvage as an economic industry in Isla Huesos’s early history (which was why the high school’s mascot was a wrecker, not a coffin) could not be emphasized enough, the book explained.
The first captain of a salvage operation to reach a stranded vessel after it wrecked was awarded, by maritime law, half the value of whatever he and his crew were able to save of the ship’s cargo. This made salvaging an extremely profitable business to go into, especially since the strait between Isla Huesos and Cuba had been so highly trafficked back in the eighteen hundreds — thanks in part to the discovery of the Gulf Stream, a strong current from the tip of Florida that kicked whatever sailed on it all the way to Spain, like a slingshot — and the fact that the waters were so treacherously difficult to navigate due to the coral reef and unpredictable storms. There was often as many as a shipwreck a week off the shores of Isla Huesos … though some captains from those stranded ships complained they’d been run aground on purpose by salvagers (also known as wreckers), using all manner of tricks.
Of course no such thing was ever proven in the Isla Huesos courts. I imagined this was probably because all the judges and juries were related to the wreckers, while the captains and the companies
they worked for were from the mainland. They were never going to get a fair trial, especially in a place sitting on top of an underworld.
It was just that the date, October 11, 1846. William Rector had died on October 11, 1846, in the same hurricane that had wiped out most of Isla Huesos. October 11, 1846, was also, according to Mr. Smith, the day of the last known sighting of the necklace I was wearing around my neck, on the cargo list of a merchant ship that had docked in Isla Huesos … but all of her cargo and crew went missing in the hurricane.
Including John.
My fingers shaking, I flipped to the back of the book Mr. Smith had given me … given me because, I now remembered, I’d mentioned the name of the ship on which John had been working at the time of his death: the Liberty.
There it was, listed in the book’s index. The Liberty. I flipped to the page on which the notation said the reference could be found.
The Liberty was one of over two dozen boats sunk in the port of Isla Huesos by the raging winds and floodwaters of the October hurricane of 1846, in which over a thousand lives were lost. Carrying a cargo of precious goods, tobacco, coffee, sugar, and cotton from Havana, the Liberty was bound for Portsmouth. The vessel was declared a total loss. No sign of it was ever recovered. Captain: Robert Hayden, Hayden and Sons.
It took me several seconds to make sense of what I was seeing … at least the part that said Captain: Robert Hayden. I didn’t much care about the rest.
Robert Hayden? The captain of the ship — the man John had said he’d killed — had the same last name as he did?
And the company they’d worked for … Hayden and Sons? What did that mean?
I tried to think of several different scenarios — anything except what I was fairly sure it had to mean.
“The captain of the Liberty,” I remembered saying to John. “He must have been very bad.”
“He was the worst person I’ve ever known,” John had replied, his voice like ice.
Oh, God. I closed the book, feeling suddenly so dizzy, I thought I might pass out. How could I have been so stupid? I’d been relieved — relieved — that all John had done was kill a man. I’d thought it could have been something so much worse.
But what was worse than killing your own father?
Killing your own granddaughter, I supposed. That was about it.
I felt shaky and sick, though I told myself I was being ridiculous. Nothing had changed. John was still the same person.
He was a person who had maybe — probably — killed his father. That’s all.
There was a knock on the door. “Pierce?” It was Kayla’s voice.
“Sorry,” I said, my own voice trembling. “I need another minute.”
“It’s all right,” Kayla said. “Take your time. I just wanted you to know that Frank and I are leaving to take Alex home. But John’s out here waiting for you.”
Great.
“Okay, thanks,” I said. “Bye.”
I probably should have opened the door and given her a hug. Who knew when — or if — I’d see her again.
I was in no condition to think rationally, though. I certainly wasn’t in any condition to see John.
He must have had a good reason. He’d said he’d a good reason. What was it? Oh, yes. He hadn’t agreed with the course the captain had set.
“He was the one who struck the first blow, Pierce,” he’d said. “You’ve got to believe me. I never meant to kill him.”
“Of course,” I’d murmured. “You were only protecting yourself.”
From his own father, it turned out.
I stared at my reflection in the mirror above the sink. Speaking of wrecks, I looked like one, circles under my eyes and my lips the color of sand. The hairband I’d been trying to use as a disguise really wasn’t doing me much good, either.
I splashed some water on my face, then dug inside my bag for my cosmetic kit, which I’d always carried in case my father showed up at school to sweep me off to a fancy restaurant. This had actually happened once or twice.
What I couldn’t understand was why Robert Hayden had been listed as captain of the Liberty in the book if he’d been dead, as John had maintained, before the ship arrived in Isla Huesos. There’d obviously been no record of the murder … or the mutiny. Maybe the historian who’d written the book was going by what had been listed on the ship’s log. It was possible the Liberty hadn’t been at port long enough before the hurricane struck for anyone to find out her captain had been murdered at sea … by his own son.
Through the window, I heard a woman’s voice rise in indignation, and then a slap, and a faint scuffle. The ordinary sounds of a street festival at which there’d been way too much alcohol served, I supposed, dully.
After some lip gloss and eyeliner, I began to look more human … and feel that way, too. It was amazing how a little makeup could boost your confidence. Kayla was totally right about that. I took out the elastic band and finger-brushed my hair, the way I’d seen her do it.
I looked a thousand times better. Maybe John was right about the white dress.
Of course, he’d also killed his father, so possibly his judgment wasn’t the best.
Except that it was. I knew it was. Why else had he been given the job of keeper of the dead? Why else when he was around did I always — well, almost always — feel so safe and secure?
He’d told me I was lucky my grandmother was possessed by a Fury. At least that way I knew why she was so hateful. There was no explanation, he’d said, for why the people in his family were such monsters.
Finding out your father was a monster was a good reason to kill him. Perhaps, given the opportunity, I might kill my grandmother.
I was going to go out there and ask him, I decided. Why did you kill your father?
It was then that I heard a familiar coo, coo, and looked up. Hope was sitting on the sill of the stained-glass window, fluttering her wings impatiently enough to reveal the dark feathers beneath the creamy white ones.
“I’m coming,” I said to her, distracted. “All right?”
I looked to see if I’d left anything behind. The black dress. I didn’t want it anymore. I knew it was wasteful to throw away a dress, but it was the dress my grandmother had tried first to kill, then pepper-spray me in. It was also the dress I’d been wearing when John had fudged the truth about the identity of the man he’d killed.
I decided it was an unlucky dress, and that I never wanted to see it again.
I pulled it from the sink, wrung it out, then stuffed it into the garbage can. Then I threw some paper towels over it so no one would notice it right away, for good measure.
I turned to unlock the door, catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I did so.
The diamond on the end of my necklace was jet-black.
Blacker than the uniform belonging to the female police officer who kicked open the door a second later, sending it crashing against the sink, and making Hope vanish in a puff of white and black feathers.
The police officer didn’t have her gun drawn. Instead, she’d pulled out her Taser. I could see the electric blue spark leaping from one deadly looking metal prong to the other at the tip, so I knew it was charged … and on.
“Pierce Oliviera,” the policewoman said. “Right?”
Without even thinking about it, I shook my head, denying who I was. No. I wasn’t Pierce Oliviera.
In a way, I wasn’t even lying. I didn’t know who Pierce Oliviera was anymore. I didn’t think I’d been that girl for some time … not since becoming an NDE, anyway. And certainly not since I’d become a resident of the Underworld.
Somehow spending so much time amongst the dead hadn’t given me less of a sense of self. If anything, it had shown me how much better suited I was to their world, and how little welcome I was — like now, for instance — in my own.
The crazy thing was, I knew the policewoman’s name. She’d been with Police Chief Santos a few days earlier when he’d questioned me at school about Jade’
s death, because they’d found my bike chained to the cemetery fence. Her name was Officer Hernandez. She was a diminutive brunette who’d looked then as if she’d wanted to tase me simply for being alive.
And now here she was about to tase me for … for what, exactly?
She looked down at a piece of paper she was holding crumpled in one hand. I was horrified to see that it was one of the “missing” flyers my mom had had stacks of all over her living room, with my photo emblazoned on it.
“Yeah,” Officer Hernandez said. “It’s you, all right.”
Then she held up the Taser like it was a knife she intended to embed in my chest.
I was too scared to think. I saw what she was right away — not a member of Isla Huesos’s finest, doing her job (although I doubted Police Chief Santos told any of his officers to tase me), but a Fury.
I should have screamed. If I had, I’m sure John — wherever he’d disappeared to — would have come right away.
Instead I did the stupidest thing possible. I stood there and asked, “Why?”
“My father,” she said, shaking her head as if I were simpleminded. “He told me what your boyfriend did to him —”
What? I was too confused even to think of screaming after that. My eyes were transfixed by the dancing blue flame I saw coming closer and closer to me. Realizing what was going to happen if that flame actually touched me, I kicked her as hard as I could — blindly, because I couldn’t bear to look into that leaping electric spark.
The soles of my ballet flats made contact with something soft. I heard a pained grunt, and then a crash.
When I opened my eyes, I saw that my kick hadn’t sent Officer Hernandez far. She’d dropped the Taser, though. It had skidded beneath a chair a few feet away.
“Resisting arrest,” she said, from between gritted teeth. “Not smart.”
Then she tackled me. She was in better shape than I was, and stronger, too. We hit the carpeted lobby floor with a thud that knocked all the wind from me. As I lay beneath her, stunned, I saw the face of the hotel desk clerk peek around the corner, then just as quickly dart away. He wasn’t going to get involved in an altercation between an officer of the law and someone who hadn’t even paid for a room.
