by Sara Saedi
“I saw pictures of Abby on prom night again. She posted them to her Instagram for Throwback Thursday,” Maura said. Her eyes filled with tears. “She looks so happy with Adam Flanagan. Joshua’s only been gone since February. How could she move on so quickly?”
Gregory shrugged, but he knew that teenagers were fickle. He imagined that Joshua’s girlfriend had cried her eyes out for the first month that he was gone, but as soon as her friends started debating prom dates and browsing for dresses, she’d been able to carry on. Even Katie Anderson had found a way to move on with her life.
Prior to Gregory’s failed attempt at rescuing his kids, he’d learned that Katie had woken up from her coma. At the time, there was no indication of whether she’d suffered permanent memory loss or if she’d be able to walk again. She was awake and that was the most important thing. Gregory was still in need of his cane when he and Maura requested to visit her in the hospital. Her parents stayed in the room the whole time and didn’t say much, but at least they allowed them to make the visit. He knew the Anderson family believed that Joshua and his siblings had simply decided to run away so that he could avoid serving time. He wasn’t able to tell them about the seventeen-year-old sociopath from his past who’d returned with a vengeance.
Katie was nice to them when she didn’t have to be. She said that she hoped their kids would be found safe, and that one day she’d get to meet Joshua so she could forgive him in person. Gregory wanted so badly to tell her that he hadn’t raised an entitled brat, and that Joshua was not the type to shirk responsibility. They thanked Katie and her parents, and didn’t say a word to each other on the drive home. The Andersons were the lucky ones now. They had their daughter back and she was making great strides. She even insisted on getting out of her hospital bed and hobbling to the door to see them out.
Gregory cleared the table and dumped the rest of the Sweet Honey Stew out in the sink. A dollop of Greek yogurt could have helped cut down the bitterness, but he didn’t have the will to try it out. It took him a moment to hear the banging on the door over the wails of the garbage disposal. He turned it off and limped his way to the door.
“Just a minute,” he yelled.
Maura came down from the stairs.
“Who is it?” she asked.
Gregory looked through the peephole and found a tear-stained Vanessa standing on their front step, holding a laptop under her arm.
“Mr. Dalton,” she said, as soon as he opened the door, “I found Wylie.”
* * *
“She posted this video an hour ago,” Vanessa said. “I got the notification on my phone, but I couldn’t get it to play. I went straight home to watch it on my computer.”
Maura squeezed his hand as Wylie’s beautiful face filled the screen. She looked tired and scared, but she was alive.
“My name is Wylie Dalton. I went missing from New York City with my brothers several months ago. A woman named Olivia Weckler is keeping us in a facility in upstate New York. I don’t know where we are exactly. It was about a three-hour drive from Manhattan. The roads were covered in potholes. We turned left at the train tracks. We walked a mile through the woods across three streams. It smelled like maple or fenugreek. We are in danger. There are fifty other kids—”
The video cut off. Gregory felt his stomach drop. The room was spinning and he needed to take a breath to make sure he wouldn’t faint or pass out. He didn’t know what any of this meant. Had Phinn originally kidnapped them and taken them to Olivia Weckler? Did that mean his children had never even gone to the island? Or had Olivia lied to him when she claimed she never found the island?
“Olivia Weckler,” Maura said. “Isn’t that the woman who came to visit you?”
Gregory nodded.
“Call the police,” he said.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
the missing dalton kids
no one was coming for them. Wylie’s virtual smoke signal hadn’t trickled onto anyone’s newsfeed. She and Phinn would die here together. Karma, in its final act, was going to kill her for every impulsive move and wrong decision.
“How long have we been in here?” she asked.
“Five days,” Phinn said.
The hunger and fatigue were starting to seem normal. Wylie didn’t remember what it was like to feel rested and satiated. Nurse Conway had given them bottled water and a stack of saltines through a slot in the door, and even though they’d had the foresight to ration, their stash was down to one cracker and one bottle of water. At least Wylie was no longer shaking like she’d just taken part in a polar bear plunge. There were times she’d wake up drenched in her own sweat and convinced the crackers were poisoned and that she was going to die.
“It’s just withdrawal.” Phinn’s teeth chattered as he reassured her. “We’ve been on a lot of drugs for a long time, and they’re finally leaving our system.”
He was right. Their bodies were used to taking parvaz and rahat pills every day. Now that they’d gone without, their organs didn’t know how to react. Wylie could handle the chills, but the nausea and cramps made her feel like she was having the most intense menstrual cycle of her life. Luckily, there was a tiny bathroom attached to the room, and when Wylie needed to throw up or just wanted a break from Phinn, she would hide in there until the claustrophobia made her feel even worse.
Phinn didn’t bother her much anyway. She wasn’t sure if the story about his parents was true or if it was just another case of him manipulating her emotions. If he was being honest, then the story made her feel foolish and guilty. Her childhood was filled with memories of pancakes and Disney movies. It was blissful compared to what Phinn and her dad had gone through.
Wylie had initially tried to ignore Phinn, but chatting with him was the only thing that eased the boredom and quelled her anxiety. Anytime there was a gap in their conversation, she fell victim to intrusive thoughts. She worried that her brothers were being deprived of food for conspiring with Wylie, or that Hopper was getting tortured by orderlies, or that Lola was being treated like a fertility experiment. Her thoughts meandered from her friends to her parents. She wondered if her dad was still recovering from his accident, and whether he’d told her mom the truth about his history. It was possible that Maura had always known about his past, but Wylie had her doubts.
“Sometimes I think your dad’s like a complicated algebra problem, and I’ll never figure out what X equals,” Maura told her once, long before they’d announced their plans to divorce.
Ever since Phinn revealed that her dad nearly drowned trying to get to her and her brothers, she felt a persistent need to see her parents again. Or maybe it was the fever and chills that were making her homesick. She wanted her mom to place her hand on her forehead to check if her temperature was still high and her dad to come home with a giant container of matzo ball soup from the diner around the corner.
“Do you remember your number?” Phinn asked.
“You mean like my phone number?”
“No,” Phinn said. “Do you know how many days you have left till you turn eighteen? Have you been keeping track?”
It was hard to delineate the days from each other in this cell. Phinn had brought her to the island on her seventeenth birthday. She’d spent three weeks on Hopper’s boat, and twenty-eight days at BioLark. That included the travel time it took them to get to the facility.
“Three hundred and sixteen, I think,” she said. “Do you know yours?”
“Somewhere around two hundred and fifty. Not that it matters anymore. I don’t have to worry about getting back to the island in time.”
“What are you gonna do if we get out of here?” she asked.
Phinn shrugged. “I think I have some family that’s still living. An aunt or two. I could always look them up. I’ll figure it out.”
He slid the last saltine to Wylie, but she felt bad consuming the entire cracker. She split it in h
alf and shared it with him.
“There’s something you need to know about Hopper,” Phinn said as he chewed slowly. “You’re not gonna like it.”
And so it begins, Wylie thought. Phinn couldn’t resist. He finally had alone time with Wylie and he was going to take full advantage.
“I don’t want to hear any more of your lies, Phinn.”
She wished she could go through the rest of her life only being told the truth. She wished that human beings were incapable of lying.
“It’s not a lie,” Phinn insisted.
“There’s nothing you can say that would make me look at him differently. I will never stop being his friend.”
“He’s only got about three days,” Phinn blurted. “That’s what you need to know. He’s only got about three days until he turns eighteen. I did the math. He’d just turned seventeen when I brought him to the island. He’s been in exile for almost a year. I’m only telling you for his sake. Otherwise, he’ll lie about it to go back to the island with you, and he’ll end up like those other BioLark scientists.”
Don’t fall for it, Wylie told herself. It was a good lie, but Phinn had a lot of time to come up with it. Hopper wouldn’t have kept this from her. He said he was sixteen when Phinn brought him to the island. He would have told her if his time was running out.
“You’re making that up to pull us apart.”
Phinn shrugged. “Not everything is about you, Wylie. I messed up his life. I’m not going to let him go back to the island just so he can die a horrible death.”
Hopper had never told Wylie his number and she’d never thought to ask. They were so caught up in fantasizing about their future on the island that the subject never came up. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if he celebrated his eighteenth birthday within the confines of a fake jungle. He could have a future with her in New York. Just like the line in Phinn’s letter, they could see who they would be ten or twenty years from now. Wylie imagined them debating whether or not to stay in the city or move to the suburbs. She could fall asleep to the sound of his guitar at night, and he could wake up to the sound of her clanking around the kitchen, prepping breakfast.
“Do you love him as much as you loved me?” Phinn asked. “I mean, before we imploded?”
Wylie didn’t know if she should give him an honest answer. She didn’t want her story to be purely about a girl caught between two guys. Her feelings were none of Phinn’s business. He’d lost the privilege of asking questions that dipped below the surface. But before she could open her mouth to tell him exactly that, the lights above them flashed and an alarm blared so loudly that Wylie thought her eardrums had suffered permanent damage.
“What’s happening?” she asked frantically.
“I have no idea,” Phinn said.
The timbre of his voice shifted. Wylie picked up on an emotion that she’d never detected in the countless times she’d heard him speak: fear. And maybe because she felt the same way, she grabbed his hand and held it tight.
* * *
Some of Gregory’s fondest memories of life behind the door of their brownstone took place on summer nights. On the rare evenings when none of his kids made plans with their friends or retreated into their bedrooms to ignore their parents, they would gather in the living room where the cold from the air conditioner blew the strongest. The absence of sun allowed them a break from the heat, but the air was still thick with humidity and sometimes Gregory felt like it was hard to breathe or even speak. It was usually on these nights that he missed the perfect weather on the island. He wished that his past wasn’t a secret. He wished that he didn’t have to stop himself any time he wanted to describe something as “tropic” or “porcelain.” He wanted to turn off the TV, and turn to his wife and his kids and share stories of his childhood and strange upbringing and the reason he still found adults suspect, even though he was one.
He looked at his kids on those nights and wondered which one would thrive in a place like Minor Island. Micah was the one most likely to come out of his shell. He’d probably find a kindred spirit in Tinka. He needed someone who could bust his balls and compliment his artwork at the same time. Joshua would appreciate Phinn’s sense of order and the illusion of freedom punctuated by strict rules. Wylie would be the first to fall in love with Minor Island, but she would also be the first to grow bored and restless. It would be the kitchen and vegetables that would suck her in completely—and, of course, the chance to stay seventeen forever. But the magic would wear off. Wylie’s personality was too big for deserted islands. She needed to grace the rest of the world with her presence.
“It’s cold out here,” Maura said.
She was right. The warm Manhattan climate hadn’t followed them on the wild goose chase their daughter had sent them on. They’d spent days looking for pot holes and train tracks and wooded areas that smelled like maple. The video that Wylie had streamed on her Facebook page had gone viral, and the police had turned the case over to the FBI. Every news outlet across the country played it on repeat. Now the volunteer center was filled with friends from their neighborhood and Harper Academy, answering the sudden barrage of phone calls. They received hundreds of tips from residents of upstate New York claiming they knew exactly the area that Wylie referenced in her plea for help. But none of them seemed to know the precise location of a secluded building in the woods. There was also no trace of Olivia Weckler. Her family home had been searched, but the Feds didn’t find any evidence of fifty kids being kept anywhere nearby. The phone number Gregory had for her was no longer in service. It had only been a few days since Wylie’s live stream had hit the internet, but if Olivia knew about it, she’d have enough time to cover up her tracks and come up with a contingency plan.
Gregory took off his sweatshirt and gave it to Maura. He was almost twice her size, and she looked adorable. She placed the hood over her head and it nearly covered her eyes.
“You look like a giant storm cloud,” Gregory said.
Maura laughed and held her hands up in the air. “I’m always raining down on you, aren’t I?”
There were two FBI agents whose job it was to keep the Daltons out of danger. They forced them to stay a safe distance from the rest of the search party. But after they crossed the third stream and continued the walk through crackling leaves, the excitement was palpable across the vast landscape that divided them from the other agents. They were close. They could all feel it. The scent of maple was so overwhelming that Gregory could practically taste it. He was so proud of Wylie. She’d known to pay attention to her surroundings in case she ever got the chance to send a proper distress signal.
An FBI agent ran toward them. Despite the cold weather, his forehead was sprinkled with beads of sweat and his underarms were soaked from perspiration. He was breathing so hard that Gregory worried he might have a heart attack before he could get his message out.
“We found it,” he said. “We found a building. We think this is where your kids are being kept. You need to wait here.”
“No,” Maura quickly responded. “We need to be there. My husband knows Olivia. He might be able to help.”
The exterior of the building took his breath away. It looked like a massive observatory erected in a place with no views. It must have taken years to construct, but Olivia had more than enough funds to put it together. The Feds had the perimeter surrounded, and from where he and Maura were ordered to remain, he couldn’t make out any windows or doors. They’d been told to prepare themselves for a standoff that might last hours or even days.
“We may have to take extreme measures to get your kids home,” Agent Sutter explained.
He was the lead agent on the case, and was a man of few words and facial expressions. Gregory regularly caught him rolling his eyes at any mention of magical islands and flowers that could make you fly.
“This is it,” Gregory said as he grabbed Maura’s hand. “We
’re going to get our children back.”
Maura nodded and squeezed his hand in return.
He didn’t want to tell her his next thought. That if their children had been to the island, then the versions of them that they’d be getting back would be nothing like the versions that went missing months ago. Those children were gone forever.
“This is the FBI,” Agent Sutter shouted into a megaphone, “We’ll need your full cooperation.”
* * *
Wylie had to let go of Phinn’s hand so she could plug her ears and quiet the sound of the blaring alarm. The flashing lights made her dizzy and reminded her of the migraine spells she sometimes had after her basketball games. The rest of the team would go out for pizza, and Wylie would have to go home and crawl under the covers for hours.
“Has this ever happened before?” she screamed at Phinn over the sound of the screeching.
“No,” he said.
The longer the alarm sounded, the more terrible outcomes danced around in Wylie’s head. The entire building was on fire and they were going to die of smoke inhalation. They were actually closer to the ocean than the woods and the alarm was a tsunami warning. Lola had gone into premature labor and Olivia had triggered the alarm to get the entire staff to assist with the delivery. Bandit had tried to kill himself again, but this time he’d actually succeeded. Whatever amoral tests they were conducting in the labs had been contaminated, and now they were all going to rapidly age until they abruptly died.
Phinn got up and banged on the door. He screamed that they were stuck in here and someone needed to let them out, but Wylie knew no one could hear them.
