I shoved the wardrobe back into place and took the photo and the birth certificate to my room, hiding them in my school bag, deep inside my econ textbook. Mrs. MacLeod had already searched my bags, and I felt reasonably sure she’d pass over my book bag if she snooped again. More secrets, more questions. I should have known nothing good would come from more snooping around. I needed to see my grandmother. Then maybe I could actually unravel the knot of secrets that had snarled me up when I’d come here, before it choked me for good.
Doyle avoided me all week, until Friday afternoon when I was waiting for the bus. His bruises had gone down, and just a faint purple crescent under his eye indicated he’d ever been hit. “I’m sorry about my dad,” he said, after standing beside me silently for a minute.
“Don’t apologize for him,” I said. “I’m sorry I got you in trouble.”
“If it wasn’t you, it’d be something else,” Doyle said. “He’s an angry bastard.” He surprised me by taking my cheek gently in his palm. “I’m sorry if he scared you.”
I shrugged. “I’ve seen scarier.” I moved away, feeling myself flush a bit. “You probably shouldn’t be petting my cheek where Valerie can see.”
“We broke up,” Doyle said.
I stared at him, waiting for more, but he just kicked at the ground with one toe. I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I pretended to be really interested in the flagpole until the bus pulled up. I did want to take things further with Doyle, but not like this, as his rebound after Valerie. If we dated and broke up, we couldn’t be friends anymore, at least not in the same way, and I really needed a friend in this place, more and more every day.
“Ivy!”
I felt like I jumped a foot when Betty grabbed my shoulder. “Don’t do that!” I said, brushing her off. “I hate being touched without any warning.”
“So they changed the schedule and the movie this week is Harold and Maude,” she burbled. “It’s a little weird but it was one of my mom’s favorites, and if you wanted to go you could spend the night. My dad said it was okay, and it’s obviously okay with me because I’m asking. We could make popcorn and watch TV if you stayed over. We don’t have HBO or anything because there’s too much explicit content—that’s what my dad calls anything that’s R-rated, but we could watch old comedies. Like Bewitched. I love Samantha, I was her for Halloween four years in a row—”
“I’d like that,” I cut her off. I didn’t know how spending a weekend with Betty and her family would turn out, but it had to be better than being alone in the manor house. And whatever the food situation, I bet it wouldn’t include stew.
“Really?” Betty’s face lit up. I felt like a real jerk—Betty was weird and socially stunted, but she was genuine, and that was a pretty rare trait in people in general, and high school girls in particular. I didn’t get the feeling around Betty I needed to lie and trick her to make myself seem acceptable.
I wasn’t forgetting about my mission to find and meet my grandmother, just putting it on hold for a weekend, I reasoned. Besides, I’d need an excuse that let me leave Darkhaven alone for a day or two. I didn’t want Simon to know what I was doing. Not yet.
“Really,” I said. “If you can pick me up at the dock tomorrow, I think going to a movie would be fun.” Even if it was a movie about creepy age-difference romances and assisted suicide.
“I’ll be there!” she promised. “Well, me and my dad. He only has the one truck, so he’ll have to take us around, but usually he doesn’t mind as long as you don’t mess with the radio or get mud on stuff.”
“See you tomorrow,” I said as the bus pulled up and I climbed on. I waved to Doyle as we drove away, but he pretended he didn’t see me. I sighed and shut my eyes. I was going to have a lot of damage control to do there. I needed Doyle, I admitted. He was the only other person on Darkhaven I trusted.
“Are you sure?” Simon frowned at me over his glasses when I went into his office to tell him I’d be gone overnight. He had a laptop I hadn’t seen before open on his desk, and was doing something with a bunch of financial spreadsheets. I saw one of the little hotspot antennas sitting on his desk next to a taxidermy rabbit, and pointed at it.
“Can I get one of those?”
Simon blinked at the subject change but then nodded. “Of course. You probably need a computer for school. I’ll order you one, and a smartphone.”
Wow, that was easy. I should have started asking for stuff the second I stepped off the boat. I probably could have worked my way up to a car by now.
“Ivy,” Simon said. “Are you really certain you want to spend time with this Betty person?”
“I spend time with her at school every day,” I said. I was surprised Simon was pushing back at this. I’d figured anyone I hung out with who wasn’t Doyle would get an automatic pass from my uncle.
“Some residents of Darkhaven, the town—especially those who are, shall we say, socioeconomically disadvantaged—harbor resentment toward the Bloodgoods,” he said. “They feel the town’s fortunes waned with ours, starting when my grandfather committed mass murder.”
“So Doyle isn’t okay because we’re in some weird feud with his family, and Betty isn’t okay because she’s too poor?” I said sharply. “Who exactly would you approve of as my friend, Simon?”
Simon sucked in a breath, and at least had the courtesy to look embarrassed. “That is not what I meant. I don’t appreciate having my words twisted.”
I spread my hands. “Then what?”
“I’m trying to protect you,” he said. “From how nasty people in a small town can be.”
“I’ve done a pretty good job of protecting myself so far,” I said. “So, thank you, but I’m fine.” My real thought was that Simon, who stayed in his manor house and only ever socialized with his equally reclusive housekeeper, hadn’t exactly taken up the mantle on improving my family’s bad reputation with the townies.
“Very well,” Simon grumped. “But you be home by noon on Sunday. I don’t want you exhausted and missing school.”
I waved to show him I’d heard as I walked out. He was starting to get better at sounding like a parent, which sucked. I kind of liked the whole easygoing, confused-nerd thing we’d started with.
But I could go, and that was what mattered. I actually felt kind of light for the first time in months. It had been a week since I’d hallucinated or had a blackout, I was going to do something normal with a friend—it was almost like I was normal. Or could at least fake it for a weekend.
Chapter 20
Betty and I had fun at the movie, at least I thought so. It was a tiny theater, the seats smelled like decades of dust and creaked when I moved. I laughed in all the right places, although watching Betty react to the movie was more fun than the actual film, which I’d seen before with PJ, in between us watching his Dario Argento collection for the twentieth time. After, Betty’s father picked us up out front, Betty and I squeezing into the front seat of his pickup.
Mr. Tyler was silent as we drove, a tall, skinny guy with a couple of days’ beard, dressed in dirty work clothes. I wondered where Betty got her chattiness from, considering aside from saying hello her father literally hadn’t spoken. I started when he did speak as we pulled into the flat gravel parking space next to the Tylers’ trailer. “So, Ivy,” he said. “Where are you living?”
“I . . .” I considered lying, but Betty would just rat me out. “I live on Darkhaven Island,” I said. “Simon Bloodgood is my uncle.”
Mr. Tyler stared at me more closely as he unlocked the door and let us inside. The trailer looked like a dingy time capsule, everything that had been inside it in 1960-whatever when it was built still in place. “You’re Myra’s daughter?” he said. It was my turn to stare. Suddenly the avocado wallpaper and the plastic furniture were the least interesting thing in my vicinity.
“You know—knew my mother?” I corrected myself.
“Yup,” he said. “We’ve spent some time away, but I grew up right here in D
arkhaven. Just down the road.”
“Daaaad,” Betty sighed, opening the fridge and taking out the kind of soda that has all the caffeine and sugar left out. “Ivy doesn’t want to hear about that.”
“No!” I said quickly. “I do. I don’t know much about my mom’s life here.”
“Myra was a good girl,” he said, surprising the heck out of me. “I mean, we were all trouble back then. Me, her, our whole group of friends. Your uncle was the only straight arrow in the bunch. But I’m glad to see Myra straightened out and had a family. You look like her.”
I tried to smile, feeling my throat tighten up. “Thanks,” I managed. I didn’t know what else to say. It wasn’t my job to burst his bubble about Mom.
Betty handed me a soda and tugged on my arm. “Come on, Ivy,” she said. “Dad let me put the TV in my room because you’re company. We can watch Cheers and Bewitched and . . .”
“Elizabeth, she’s barely gotten her coat off,” her father said, laughing a little. “Why don’t I make you two some popcorn and you can settle in?”
Not for the first time since I got here, I realized I hadn’t judged somebody correctly. I saw Betty’s dad and assumed he was basically the same as Mom and most of the people I knew back in Nebraska—blue collar because they had to be, mostly focused on getting enough cash to get wasted and not have to work for a few weeks. The Tylers clearly weren’t that. They were nice people, normal people, a functional family from what I could see. Poor, sure, but Mr. Tyler clearly worked his ass off making this trailer livable—it was the cleanest, neatest mobile home I’d ever been inside. There were no overflowing ashtrays, no empties in the kitchen sink, and no clutter anywhere. It reminded me of the tidy main cabin of a ship.
Betty’s “room” was a tiny space behind a plywood partition and a folding door, but it was cozy and decorated with fluffy pink everything. “This is nice,” I said, trying to find a place for my stuff amid all the sequins and satin.
“I made all of it,” she said. “The curtains and the duvet and everything.”
“Wow,” I said, meaning it. “I can’t sew or anything. It’s cool you can.”
“I learned because we don’t have any money,” she said, still smiling as she turned on the ancient tube TV with a remote the size of a sandwich. “If I want to look nice, I have to buy things at the thrift store or make them. I got tired of being teased where we lived before, so I taught myself to sew, and sometimes I go to the swap meet and sell stuff I find to help out Dad with bills. He works construction and he’s gone all the time, so I have to make sure to buy groceries, and if a bill comes when he’s not here, I pay it.”
I sat on the edge of her bed as she flipped channels, the TV fizzing. “That sounds rough,” I said.
Betty cut a sharp glance at me, the first I’d ever seen her give. “I don’t want your pity,” she said. “I know I’m poor. It’s a fact of life, and it is what it is.”
I held up my hands. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Obviously you have it handled.” I thought about telling her about my life before Darkhaven, but I didn’t want to come across like I was one-upping her. I’d always hated that game when I’d been the one with the thrift-store clothes who lived in a trailer.
We watched Cheers in the longest silence I’d ever had around Betty. Finally the microwave beeped in the main room and Mr. Tyler knocked at the partition. “Popcorn, girls.”
“Come in,” Betty said, muting the TV. Her dad handed over a bowl of popcorn and then looked at me.
“Do you need anything, Ivy?”
I smiled my best parent-pleasing smile. “I’m fine, thank you. You’ve been a very good host.”
“It’s the Christian thing to do,” he said. “Besides, Betty speaks very highly of you.” He started to leave, and then turned back. “If I can ask, since you’re in my home—do you have a personal relationship with Jesus?”
I felt my embarrassment at my prejudgment and my gaffe with Betty ease a little. There was always one weird quirk to even the most normal-seeming people. I guess all the talk about Mr. Tyler and his fundie leanings wasn’t totally off base.
“I’m good,” I told him. “Jesus and I are tight.” I glanced at Betty, crossing my fingers she wouldn’t rat me out.
“Good,” Mr. Tyler said, seeming more relaxed. “No later than midnight, girls. Sleep well.”
Betty didn’t last until midnight, falling asleep and snoring lightly. I curled up on my side of her bed after I shut off the TV, watching branches weave shadows on the trailer’s ceiling as moonlight streamed in. I usually never had trouble sleeping in strange places, and tonight was no different.
I bolted awake some time later. Betty’s clock, which was shaped like a pink plastic heart, glowed on her nightstand, reading after 2:00 a.m. I blinked, trying to figure out what had woken me. Wind whined around the trailer’s curved walls, shaking it down to its foundation. The shadows on the ceiling twisted violently, seeming alive.
All except one. The shape was an indeterminate height and gender, but it was definitely a person, near enough to the Tylers’ window that their shadow had crept inside.
I breathed in, out, slow, trying to ground myself, digging my fingers into the edge of Betty’s cheap mattress so I could feel something real. I guessed I’d spoken too soon about the hallucinations. I couldn’t let on what was going on, and I didn’t know what would come next, so I stayed frozen, watching as the shadow got longer.
The person was moving, closer.
“It’s not real,” I whispered out loud. “It’s not there. Make yourself not see it.”
I kept up the mantra, and it kept moving, until a crack from the other room made me squeeze the mattress so tightly I bent back a fingernail. I knew the sound of an air pistol anywhere.
“Hey!” Mr. Tyler bellowed from outside. “I see you! You come around here again and you’ll get more than a pellet in the backside!”
Betty jumped beside me, waking up. “Dad?” she called. I heard the outer screen door of the trailer bang, the inner door slam, and a bunch of locks clicking.
“It’s all right!” Mr. Tyler called back. “He’s gone.”
He opened the door to the bedroom, still holding the camo-painted airsoft pistol. “You girls okay?” he said. Betty rolled her eyes.
“Put the gun away, Dad. What is going on out there?”
“Prowler,” Mr. Tyler said. “Probably those damn kids from the other side of the park, excuse my language.”
I wasn’t so sure. The shadow had been out there for a while. That wasn’t kid behavior. That was stalker behavior. I had the bad, bad feeling that whoever they were, they weren’t out there because of the Tylers.
“You actually saw him?” I said. “The person?”
“Saw the back of him,” Betty’s dad grunted. “Just track pants and a hoodie. He’s lucky I didn’t see his face, or I’d be out there running him down.”
I exhaled long and slow. It had been real. I was still in the clear.
Of course, now I had to handle the fact there had been somebody out there watching me, in all likelihood. I wondered if one of Liam Ramsey’s creepy clan was keeping tabs on me.
“Are you all right, Ivy?” Mr. Tyler asked. Betty also laid a hand on my arm. “You don’t have to be scared. I’ve got plenty more guns that don’t just shoot pellets, and I’m a light sleeper.”
“I’m not scared,” I said. That was the first non–white lie I’d told the Tylers—had to be some kind of record.
Mr. Tyler nodded and backed out of the room, and Betty flopped down, turning the light out. It took me a long time to fall back to sleep—until it was light out, and the shadows were gone.
Betty asked me again at breakfast if I was all right—I wasn’t hiding my jumpiness very well. It had been nice to get off the island for a while, but now I wanted to go home. I turned down Mr. Tyler’s offer to go to church with them and told him I’d be ready to go whenever he was. Betty looked down, pushing her cereal around in her bowl.
>
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just didn’t sleep very well last night even before the prowler. I was doing more research into that Children of Cain thing you helped me translate from the old journal and it kind of freaked me out.” That was better than letting on I was pretty sure somebody was following me around, creeping on me when I was asleep.
Mr. Tyler turned sharply from the mirror over the kitchen sink, where he was tying his ratty tie at the collar of his church shirt. “Did you say ‘Children of Cain?’”
I nodded hesitantly, worried I was about to earn a Bible lecture or possibly just be thrown out of the trailer.
Mr. Tyler frowned. “What’s your interest?”
“It’s research,” Betty said quickly. “For our independent study. Local history.”
“You know about the group in the eighties,” Mr. Tyler said, not a question.
“A little,” I said.
“I assume your project is focused on the disappearances,” Mr. Tyler said. I raised an eyebrow.
“Disappearances. Right. You know, newspaper stories we found are vague. Anything an actual local knows would be really helpful.”
Betty cut me a look, a small grin on her face. I was just lucky she thought my ability to spin bullshit on demand was cool, and not a sign of sociopathy.
“Four of the five people in the commune disappeared from Darkhaven Island in 1985 and were never found,” Mr. Tyler said. “I was just a kid when it happened, but my father was involved. He was chief of police.”
I felt a small ball of nerves form in my stomach. Another island secret Simon hadn’t told me about. Maybe it was just an honest omission, but those were starting to add up to something deliberate.
“Could I talk to your dad?” I asked. “It would be helpful.”
“He’s dead,” Betty piped up. “He had cancer. And a stroke. And he smoked all the time.”
“The only one still around is the guy who made it off the island,” Mr. Tyler said. “And I wouldn’t go looking for him if I were you.” He picked up his jacket from the back of their sofa and indicated the door. “Let’s get you to the dock, Ivy. Unless you’ve changed your mind about attending service.”
Dreaming Darkly Page 17
