Fury (Blur Trilogy Book 2)

by Steven James

  “Companionship?” Mia said. “So who’s going to be his companion?”

  Nicole paged forward in the diary.

  July 4, 1937

  My sister dropped off her daughter to spend two weeks with me. The girl just turned eleven yesterday.

  I have promised to care for her as if she were my own child.

  “An eleven-year-old girl?” Mia looked at her quizzically.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Hold on a sec.” She sorted through the photos, then held one up for Daniel. “Is that the girl from your blur?”

  Seeing her again sent ice running down his spine.

  “Yes.” He accepted the picture from Mia. “It is.”

  The girl was standing beside a rocky shoreline. Rather than the nightgown she’d worn in his blur, here in the photo, she had on a plain skirt that, although dated, Daniel imagined was probably in style back then. She was smiling and holding up a metal watering can.

  Who are you? What do you want from me?

  Nicole had paused while Daniel looked over the photograph, but now, as he set it down, she said, “That’s as far as I got.”

  “Well, let’s hear the next one,” he said.

  She turned the page.

  July 9, 1937

  Betty has been helping me check on the light. She enjoys going up the steps and staring out the window of the tower at the lake or standing on the narrow balcony encircling it.

  She likes to carry the lantern for me, to lead the way up through the dark.

  “Her nightgown caught fire in your blur, right?” Kyle asked Daniel softly.

  “Yes.”

  He motioned for Nicole to go on, she thumbed to the next page, and shook her head. “It’s just a description of a sunset.”

  She skipped past that.

  July 12, 1937

  She set the lantern down beside her. Oh dear God, she did.

  It was not my fault, no, no, it was not—this is what I tell myself, but it was!

  I was in the tower and saw her leave the house below. She called to me and waved, but then something, some movement in the night near the edge of the clearing, must have caught her attention because she looked that direction and then stepped to the side.

  The lantern.

  Oh, God!

  The hem of her nightgown.

  No, please!

  I didn’t make it down the tower in time.

  No one spoke for a long time.

  At last, Nicole read the next entry.

  July 13, 1937

  This morning I buried my niece here on the island. No one will find her. But now—oh! And what comes next?

  Her mother will return in five days. And I don’t know what I will tell her. What is there to say?

  Perhaps that she went swimming in the surf and never returned?

  But no—the truth.

  God, not the truth! It is too terrible a way to die.

  “There are some random words there, like he started to write something and then changed his mind. Nothing that makes sense. But then it goes on.”

  Seagulls hover and dive into the surf that is crashing up on the shore.

  I see a specter.

  The girl. Standing now in the twilight, now in the day, burning, her hands raised toward the tower but I cannot get to her in time.

  Nicole went to the next page.

  July 16, 1937

  Every night now I see her and it cannot go on. I must end this. Yes!

  Tonight, one last time I will go up the tower steps, and then never again.

  I have found a rope that is long enough. They say that hell awaits those who take their own lives. And so, if I deserve the punishment of the eternal flames, I am ready for it, for what I allowed to happen to my niece and for what I will do tonight.

  She slowly closed the journal. “That’s the last entry.”

  They all sat there in silence.

  Kyle pulled out the ledgers and sifted through them, then held the last one up for the others to see. “It looks like whoever wrote these out—maybe some sort of supervisor, I can’t read the signature—he filled out the last one on July 18, 1937.”

  “What does it say?” Daniel asked.

  “Just that there was a replacement, that there was a new keeper assigned to the lighthouse instead of Jarvis Delacroix.”

  “Delacroix? That was my grandma’s maiden name.”

  “You think you’re related to this guy?”

  “It’s not that common of a name. It would make sense.”

  Daniel was calculating dates, times, ages. “If Betty was related to Jarvis, then if I’m right about how all this works out, my grandma would have either been cousins with Betty, or maybe even her sister. Does the ledger say anything about the girl?”

  “No.”

  “Jarvis Delacroix wrote that he found a rope that was long enough,” Nicole said, “that those who take their own lives deserve to go to hell.”

  No one spoke. It was almost as if they were afraid that their words might have condemned Jarvis to the sentence he’d expected to suffer.

  “If he hanged himself,” she asked at last, “don’t you think there’d be a record of it somewhere, something about this online? We should be able to find out what happened.”

  “I don’t know,” Mia said. “Something might have appeared in a newspaper article at the time, but who’s to say that anyone ever went back and posted it on the web? If it was from some small regional paper from Bayfield or something, I’d say it’s not very likely that anyone would have bothered uploading it to the Internet.”

  Nicole pulled out her phone. “It’s worth a look.”

  As Daniel was about to get started searching online, he noticed a few texts and checked to see if any were from his dad, but it was only a couple of friends checking in.

  Distracted by everything that was going on, he quickly typed in responses, then set his phone on the bed next to him and returned his attention to his laptop, but a moment later his phone vibrated and Nicole said, “You have a text.” Before he could reach for it, she picked it up to hand it to him and noticed the screen.

  A strange look crossed her face.

  “What is it?”

  “Who’s Madeline?”

  “What?”

  She turned the phone’s screen toward him. “She’s asking you to come by tomorrow. She wants to know when you’re going to be there.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-THREE

  “Honestly, Nicole, I don’t know who she is.”

  She didn’t reply.

  “I’m serious.”

  “Then why would she text that she wants to see you and ask when you’re going to meet her?”

  “I wasn’t. I mean, I’m not going to.”

  “Well, she seems to think you are.”

  “I’ve been getting messages from her, but I don’t even know who’s sending them.”

  “Neither one of us does,” Kyle cut in, trying to help.

  Nicole looked from Kyle to Daniel and then back at Kyle. “So you knew about her too?”

  “Nicole, calm down,” Daniel said. “Let me—”

  “I am calm. I’m calm. I just want to know what’s going on. So you’ve been getting these texts from this girl: Where are they? I only see this one.”

  “They’re archived.” He showed her how to access them.

  On the one hand, Daniel could understand why Nicole would be upset, but he just wanted her to give him a chance to explain. “For the last couple days I’ve been getting these weird texts from her—or him, whoever it is. No number comes up on my phone so I can’t even reply to figure out who’s sending the messages. I’m telling you the truth; I don’t know who it—”

  “So,” she read the texts aloud, “‘
You need to come visit me. I have a surprise for you.’ Okay, that’s interesting. ‘Be careful who you tell your secrets to.’ Oh, and then there’s this one: ‘I’m here waiting for you, Daniel.’ Huh. ‘Check the basement—M.’ Really? She was at your house?”

  “No.”

  “But she left you something down there?”

  “No. Nothing like that. That’s where I found the maps. That’s all.”

  Nicole was in the middle of scrolling through his phone’s home screens when she suddenly paused.

  “What is it?”

  She didn’t respond.

  “Nicole?”

  “Your recent downloads. So I was just seeing if there are any other chat or messaging apps . . . and . . .”

  “And what?”

  “And you have an app on here that lets you send anonymous texts.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s in your recent downloads. You downloaded it Wednesday afternoon.”

  That’s right before you got the first text from Madeline.

  “Are you saying the texts were sent from my phone?”

  “I’m saying they could’ve been.” She handed him the phone.

  He stared disbelievingly at the screen, trying his best to remember either downloading the app or sending the messages, but couldn’t recall doing either.

  You’re the one who’s been sending the texts.

  No.

  Yes.

  Then why don’t you remember it?

  There’s a lot you’re not remembering lately, Daniel.

  “Did you send them?” Nicole asked.

  “I honestly don’t know. I don’t even know who Madeline is or—”

  “Hang on.” Kyle was busy at his phone. “We were looking at lighthouses in the Apostle Islands, right? So there are twenty-one islands in the National Lakeshore, but there’s one other island out there that’s not part of the park. I saw it earlier when I was doing research, but I didn’t make the . . .”

  He tapped at the screen, then nodded. “Three guesses what its name is, and the first two don’t count.”

  “Oh,” Daniel said, “don’t tell me it’s Madeline.”

  “Look at that, first try: Madeline Island.”

  “And does it have a lighthouse?”

  “It sure does.” Kyle tilted his phone so everyone else could see the page he’d pulled up. “The Lost Cove Lighthouse.”

  “That’s it, then. Let’s see if there’s any mention of a lighthouse keeper there committing suicide.”

  Sweeping his flashlight beam back and forth, Sheriff Byers scrutinized the dark forest.

  He’d been able to follow his son’s and Nicole’s boot prints most of the way, but the wind was steadily erasing them and it was getting harder and harder to discern where their trail went.

  He didn’t see any sign of the wolf that Daniel had told him about.

  The black wilderness lurked just on the boundary of the spear of light from his flashlight.

  The sheriff decided to give it a few more minutes and then call it a night.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Now that they were able to pinpoint their search to a specific time and place, it didn’t take long for the four friends to find what they were looking for.

  Kyle let out a slow breath.

  “What is it?” Daniel asked.

  “There was a newspaper back then, the Northwoods Review. There’s a story about a shipwreck on July seventeenth that year. Twelve people died.”

  “Twelve people?” Nicole swallowed hard as she said the words.

  “Yeah. The light had gone out. They hit the shoal in a storm.” Kyle consulted the article he’d pulled up on his phone. “When the survivors went to the lighthouse later they found the keeper dead in the tower. Hanged himself. It was Jarvis Delacroix. They list his name.”

  “Send me the link,” Daniel said.

  He clicked to the site as his friend went on: “It looks like they couldn’t confirm whether Jarvis killed himself before the shipwreck or after it. But the survivors said there was no light during that storm.”

  “So,” Nicole muttered, thinking aloud, “either he gave in to that temptation to put out the light and then killed himself, or he committed suicide first because of his guilt about Betty’s death and then he wasn’t there to keep it lit during that storm.”

  “Does the article mention her at all?” asked Mia.

  Kyle checked, then shook his head. “No. Nothing about anyone named Betty.”

  “But don’t you think that’s kind of weird, though? I mean, that next day—July eighteenth—was the day her mom was supposed to return to pick her up. Is it really possible that no one else connected Betty’s disappearance with the suicide or the shipwreck?”

  “I don’t know. I guess it’s possible. I mean, if there was that big of a tragedy—twelve people dying in a shipwreck—a missing girl might not really make it into the news.”

  “Or,” Daniel suggested, “there might be another explanation.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That she never existed at all.”

  “Huh?”

  “Maybe Jarvis had blurs too. Just like I do.”

  “But he mentioned her in his journal. And what about that photo of her?”

  “Just because he mentioned her doesn’t mean she was real. And we don’t know who that’s a picture of, just that it’s the same girl I saw in my blur. If I saw the stuff in that box when I was a kid, maybe I somehow remembered it. Jarvis might have seen that photo too. We know he was lonely on that island. What if he made up someone visiting him to keep himself company?”

  He turned to Mia. “Like you said earlier, lighthouse keepers sometimes go mad. Maybe that’s what happened with him.”

  No one seemed to know what to say.

  “But why now?” Kyle asked. “Why would you be remembering all this now?”

  “That’s what we need to figure out. Someone kept these diaries and hid them in that barn. The place is old, but I’m not sure it would have been there back in the 1930s, so that means someone stuck that box in the barn sometime later. But right now I’m wondering something else.”

  “What’s that?”

  “In my blur, the girl was crying tears of blood. Why? There’s nothing in the diary to indicate that Betty—whether she was real or not—would have had bleeding eyes when she died.”

  “I’m not sure how literally you need to take everything from your blurs,” Mia said. “I mean, even when Emily appeared to you a couple months ago, it wasn’t like everything that happened in your blur was identical to what happened in real life.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Betty saw something horrible? The blood is metaphorical?”

  Or maybe you did.

  Maybe you saw something horrible.

  There in the barn. Something to do with the loft, with the—

  “If Jarvis really was from your mom’s side of the family,” Kyle interrupted his thoughts, “wouldn’t she have told you about this?”

  “It’s not exactly the kind of thing you’d want to be sharing with your family members.”

  “Maybe she didn’t know about him,” Nicole offered.

  “There’s one way to find out.”

  “What’s that?”

  Daniel already had his phone out. “Ask her.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FIVE

  His mom was still up in Anchorage, Alaska, and he wasn’t certain what time zone that was in, but he put the call through anyhow.

  While he waited for her to pick up, he wondered how much he should tell her about everything that was going on.

  Back in the fall when the blurs started, his dad hadn’t felt like it was r
ight to keep any of that from her and, honestly, Daniel had found himself agreeing. So even though he wasn’t too excited about it, they’d filled her in and she knew about the blurs.

  Naturally, she’d been worried about him and had emphasized that she wanted him to see a psychiatrist to talk things through.

  However, once stuff was out in the open, neither she nor Daniel really brought up anything related to the blurs. Instead, they mostly talked about surface topics—what they’d been doing, Daniel’s grades, if his team had won, things like that.

  In a way, he wished they would talk more about stuff that really mattered, but on the other hand he was happy they didn’t go there.

  After all, once you start down that path with people, get to the emotional level, you end up in a place where you can get hurt.

  There’s really no in-between: either you can be close to someone and vulnerable, or distant and safe.

  Sort of a catch-22.

  The phone rang.

  No answer.

  Right when he thought it was about to go to voicemail, she answered and must have had caller ID because she spoke first. “Daniel?” It was clear by the way she said his name that she was surprised he was calling. “Is everything okay?”

  The question itself said a lot about their relationship: when he called, she immediately assumed something was wrong.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Oh. Well, okay. Good.”

  He felt a little stuck. How do you really get into the topic of talking about a relative who was responsible for the death of twelve people—fourteen, if you counted himself and the girl?

  If Betty was even real.

  You should have thought this through a little more.

  His friends slipped away so he could speak to his mom in private.

  “Dad said you’re coming back for Christmas?” he said to her.

  “I was planning to, but there’s a big storm system moving in up here. If we get as much snow and ice as they’re predicting, I might not make it back until after the holiday. But we’ll just celebrate it then.”