Dreaming Darkly

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “I wish I knew if my mom knew,” I said. “She’d know, right? She’d have been five or six.”

  Who knew what my mother knew, or believed, or had talked herself into believing. For all I knew my grandmother had told Mom that Simon had been kidnapped like the Lindberg baby and just turned up again.

  “You can ask the social worker,” Valerie said. “Can’t hurt to have all the facts when you ask Simon about this.”

  “I’m sure they’re long gone,” I said, but I still pulled out my phone and punched the name of the social worker who’d signed off on the adoption into Facebook. In thirty seconds I had her page, and another few screens of searches got me an address and phone number. Valerie tilted her head at me.

  “Go on, Sherlock. You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free, or whatever.”

  I called as we walked back to the car, standing and watching cars swish by on Interstate 95. I felt a lot more comfortable in wayside places like this one than places like Darkhaven. If things went bad, I could always go a few exits down the road and try again.

  “Hello?” The voice was creaky with age, and sounded suspicious.

  “Hi,” I said perkily. “Is this Sharon Swenson?”

  “Yes,” the voice said hesitantly.

  “The Sharon Swenson who worked for family services in 1990?” I said.

  “Who is this?” she snapped. I heard the click of a lighter on the other end of the phone and the crackle of a cigarette.

  “I’m hoping you can help me,” I said. “I’m looking for information about a child you worked with—Brian Jones? He’s my uncle.” Only a half lie. Legally, we were related: Benjamin and Brian were both my uncles.

  There was a long silence on the other end of the line. Only an exhalation that I assumed was smoke let me know the call was still connected. “Hello?” I said finally.

  “If Brian Jones is your uncle, you need to get away from him. Get away and stay away,” Sharon said.

  “Why?” I said. She practically shouted, and I held the phone away from my ear.

  “Brian Jones is not a person you want in your life! That’s all I’m going to say. Don’t call here again.” The phone beeped three times, and the call went dead.

  Valerie looked at me expectantly as I got in the car. “Well?”

  “Dead end,” I said. “I think I just want to go home.”

  I thought about what the social worker had said the entire ride back to Darkhaven and the island, getting more and more worked up as I did. This actually helped the argument that Simon had a good reason for not telling me about any of this. If his brother was as bad as the social worker implied, maybe Simon had totally cut ties. Maybe he felt like he was protecting me. But that still didn’t explain the lie about my grandmother, or reveal if he’d lied about anything else.

  I hit the door open so it banged against the kitchen wall. I was shaking, not sure what to think or do. I wanted to scream for Simon, but I had enough sense to realize that confronting him now wouldn’t get me what I wanted. I needed to calm down, to think, form a plan.

  I needed to talk to someone, though, or I was going to have a complete mental breakdown. I picked up the kitchen phone and punched in Doyle’s number. He picked up on the third ring. “Hello? Ivy?”

  “Ivy.”

  I just about jumped out of my skin when Simon’s voice rolled over Doyle’s in my ear. He came over and depressed the disconnect switch on the phone, taking the receiver out of my hands. “I was worried,” he said. “I called your friend Valerie’s house, and her mother said the two of you never came home after school let out. I’ve been trying to call you.”

  “We just went shopping before I took the boat back,” I said, amazed at how calm I sounded. My heart was still thudding, but I’d fallen back on the persona I used to keep marks interested, keep Mom from going nuts on me, keep everyone at arm’s length. “I must have already been in the dead zone when you were calling me.” My lying felt like armor in this moment, as I smiled pleasantly at my uncle.

  “If you were shopping, then where are your bags?” he said. Crap. Never tell a lie you need props for. That was a rookie mistake.

  “Okay,” I said. Maybe there was a way I could salvage this and get the truth at the same time. “Valerie drove me to Mid-Coast Psychiatric. To visit Simone.”

  I waited. Only one tick of the ancient kitchen clock went by, but in that second I saw a flicker behind Simon’s glasses, the short circuit of genuine surprise and anger. Then it was gone, and he was the same dorky guy with a bad sweater vest he’d always been. “I really wish you had told me before you did that,” he said. “I would have warned you not to go.”

  “Why did you lie to me?” I said. “Sure, she’s sick but it’s not like she’s the first family member I’ve visited in a psych ward.”

  “It was a mistake to keep you in the dark,” Simon said instantly. “I was trying to spare you the pain. You never knew her when she was in her right mind, and I didn’t want that . . . thing . . . to be the only memory you had of her.”

  I had always thought Simon was a bad liar, but I was starting to see how wrong I’d been. Simon was a great liar. This whole absentminded professor thing had been the lie, and the flash I’d seen when he’d realized I’d found out about my grandmother was the real him.

  “I am sorry, Ivy,” he said, regretful pinch to his mouth. “I know that must have been traumatic for you.”

  “Yeah, it sucked,” I agreed. He bustled over to the big six-burner stove and lit the gas under the kettle, taking down two cups.

  “I’ll make us some tea.”

  Suddenly, I felt exhausted. I didn’t know what Simon’s deal was, but I knew I didn’t want to spend another second pretending we were all okay with each other. “I’m good,” I said. “I have homework to do.”

  “If you change your mind, I’ll leave the kettle hot,” he said.

  “You should have told me,” I said before I went upstairs. He looked at me blandly, scooping a spoonful of tea from the tin on the counter into the little silver ball that went in the hot water.

  “Ivy, there are many things you think you’re ready for and you’re not. Your mother was the same way at your age. That tough shell you show hides the fact that underneath there’s a part of you that’s a scared little girl.”

  “How the hell would you know?” I said quietly. “She left you. You had no idea what she was like.”

  “She left Darkhaven, but she did not leave me,” he snapped, jabbing a finger at me. “I knew her better than anyone, and I know you too. That bothers you because that’s how you’ve survived, not letting anyone see your true face. I understand, Ivy. I sympathize. But you do not have that option with me.”

  He took a step toward me, eyes flat behind his glasses. “I know who you are. You and I are going to have to learn to live with each other.”

  I realized it had been a long time since I’d taken a breath. I turned and went upstairs, running all the way to my room, and shut my door. I waited. I’d learned the rhythms of the house by now—Mrs. MacLeod cleaned up from dinner and retreated to her room to watch crappy detective shows into the early morning. Simon went to his room a little while after her. I waited, flipped my mother’s tarot cards aimlessly, thought about what a bad idea this was.

  So Simon had lied. It was a big lie, but maybe he really was just trying to shield me from what had happened to my grandmother—remembering her saucer-sized eyes, twitching face, and voice like a seagull screaming sent a shiver through me even now. If that was going to happen to me, maybe he really was being kind.

  But I’d lived with Mom too long to believe that anyone, never mind a family member of mine, would have my best interest at heart. Keeping the fact he was adopted private, maybe. Posting fake obituaries and lying to me about my grandmother? That was a lie with intent behind it. And that friendly mask had been slipping further and further. Every time I did something he didn’t like I felt a little more uneasy being in the sam
e room as Simon. I had the sense something was going to happen, like when black clouds piled up on the horizon back in the Midwest. That flat look in his eyes was the tornado warning, and when the storm hit I wasn’t sure what damage it would do.

  I got up and slipped out my door, my feet silent in my socks even on the rickety wood floor. I didn’t know Simon’s intent, but if I was stuck here until I was eighteen, I needed to find out. I needed to know if I was safe, if I could still trust my instincts, or if I really was losing my mind.

  If Simon wasn’t Mom’s biological brother, that would explain why the “curse” had passed him by. Why they looked nothing alike. But not why he’d pretend otherwise.

  I didn’t love the idea of being in his office with the creepy animal skeletons in the middle of the night, but it was that or have another conversation full of veiled hostility and god-awful tea, so I used my phone as a flashlight and tried the door of his office. Locked. That had never happened before. I guess after the scene in the kitchen he didn’t trust me anymore.

  At least I was way better at burglary than the average girl. All the locks in the house were old-school and used skeleton keys, the easiest thing in the world to pick. A quick trip back to my room for a nail file and the curved hook that clipped my school ID to my backpack, and I was in business. Thirty seconds of wiggling and the door opened.

  I discovered pretty quickly there was nothing in most of the desk that would point toward Simon being up to anything other than being a rich guy with a lot of rich-guy hobbies like wine and golf. The upper-left drawer was locked, and I went to work on it with my tools.

  There was standard lock-and-key stuff in the drawer—a checkbook, a few years of tax returns, some credit cards that normally I would have snatched just on principle, a file folder of financial statements from the trust manager in New York. I wasn’t out to grift my uncle, so I ignored them, digging to the bottom of the pile of paper. My fingers brushed against hard plastic, and I pulled out a small case with a snap latch. I flipped it open and stared. It was like the kits diabetics used, except the bottle of clear liquid inside was unlabeled and was more like one of those vials you could buy to mix up perfume at home than a medical thing. There was a small clear packet of whitish-gray powder as well, tucked behind the syringes.

  Drugs? Bullshit alternative medicine? Whatever it was, it had been hidden, and that meant Simon had a reason to lock it up. He didn’t act like any addict I’d known, and I couldn’t decide if the other possibilities were better or worse.

  A board creaked over my head, and I scrabbled in the desk drawer, pulling out an extra packet of needles, each in a paper wrapper. I stripped one, jammed the business end into the red rubber circle on top of the bottle, filled it with the liquid, popped the cap back on and shoved it deep into the pocket of my hoodie. I put the case back where I’d found it, shut the drawer and gave the nail file a twist, relocking it.

  It was definitely footsteps I’d heard, coming my way overhead. I waited, frozen, not sure what I’d do if Simon came down here. Despite being crammed full of dead animals, the office didn’t offer much of a place to hide. There was the passageway, but after what had happened last time, I’d rather have him catch me than go back down into that cavern.

  After another long set of breaths, the ancient pipes groaned as an upstairs toilet flushed, and then I heard the footsteps retreat toward the master bedroom. I exhaled, wrapping my fist around the syringe and keeping it there until I was safely back in my room.

  Simon wouldn’t notice anything missing, unless he kept track of the needles, and I rolled it in my palm, staring at it in the lamplight.

  The fluid was a little bit cloudy, a few shades off from white. I uncapped the needle and squeezed out a droplet from the tip, sniffing it. An acrid, earthy odor drifted to my nose—something that smelled not medicinal but more like a folk remedy, the stuff some of Mom’s friends peddled in addition to their psychic scams. I put the cap back on the needle, but I couldn’t stop trying to remember where I’d smelled that before.

  I didn’t sleep at all that night, listening to the house breathe. How had I never noticed before how loud it was, popping and creaking, glass panes rattling in the wind, doors slamming as Mrs. MacLeod got up before sunrise to make another one of her hideous breakfasts.

  I stumbled into the kitchen yawning, syringe still in my pocket. Only Mrs. MacLeod was there, and she slammed a mug of coffee in front of me. “You look like death warmed over,” she said.

  I looked at the coffee, tan and steaming, milk thoroughly stirred. I didn’t reach for it. I hadn’t seen her pour it, and after what I’d found, I didn’t know what was going on. The stuff in Simon’s desk wasn’t for him or Mrs. MacLeod, so it had to be meant for me.

  “Too fine for coffee, now,” Mrs. MacLeod grumbled. “I’ve never seen the likes of you.”

  “Just gotta go,” I said. “I don’t want to be late.”

  I met Doyle after school and pulled him aside. “Is there somewhere we can go this afternoon? On the island? Not that cave,” I added, when he started to talk.

  “There’s a hunting blind my brothers use sometimes,” he said. “We can meet there. Is everything okay?”

  I touched the syringe in my pocket. “I don’t know.”

  “There’s no way this is good,” Doyle said, holding the syringe up to the light. We were sitting inside a hollowed-out tree, enormous and ancient, with slits cut to watch for animals in the open field in front of us. “You’re positive nobody is diabetic or allergic to bees or something?” he said.

  “Insulin doesn’t come in blank bottles and isn’t kept locked in drawers,” I said. “And if you’re allergic you have one of those pens, not this thing.”

  “Well,” Doyle said. “Maybe it’s nothing bad.”

  “Doyle,” I said. “I’ve been blacking out. I thought it was my family’s sickness, but maybe it’s this. What if somebody has been drugging me?”

  He pulled a bottle of water from the pack he’d brought and unscrewed the top. “Only one way to find out.” He popped the cap off the syringe and discharged about half of it into the water, lifting it to his lips.

  “Doyle!” I cried. “No! What if it’s something really bad? It could kill you.”

  “If they’ve been drugging you, you’re not dead yet,” he said, taking a huge swig before I could stop him. I hit his arm hard.

  “Why did you do that?” I demanded. Doyle stared at me.

  “Ivy, if someone is drugging you, you need to know. And I want to know, because I feel like I might have to kick somebody’s ass.”

  “You are so dumb sometimes, I swear,” I said. “I’m not a little lost girl. I don’t need your protection.”

  Doyle shrugged. “But you could use my help, so I’m helping. If I get dosed, eventually I’ll come down, and then we’ll know.”

  “And if something worse happens?” I said. Doyle didn’t answer me. His chin sunk down against his chest and his breathing smoothed out, like he was asleep. I poked him. “Doyle!”

  “Ivy,” he said, raising his face and grinning at me.

  “You scared me!” I said.

  “Ivy, has anyone ever told you how beautiful you are?” he said. “Not just that you’re hot, because you are, but because you care about people. You pretend you don’t, but you do. You have a light in you.” He reached for me, touching something in the air next to my face. “I can see it. . . .”

  “Okay,” I said. Obviously whatever had been in that syringe had made Doyle seriously loopy.

  “You coming here is what made me think I might actually get out,” Doyle said. “My family’s into all kinds of shady shit. I’m the youngest, and they think I don’t know but I do. Like stealing the stuff from those campers who vanished back in the day. Tip of the iceberg.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Really. Let’s just get you home.”

  “Right out there,” Doyle said, breaking free of me as we climbed out of the blind and running into the meadow
, arms spread. “Come on, Ivy!” he shouted. “Let’s commune with nature!”

  I started to follow him to get him back to the trail, so I could take him home, but there was a cracking sound and Doyle dropped out of sight. I raced over to the spot and saw a jagged hole in a circle of rotten boards hidden in the tall dead grass of the meadow. “Oh crap,” I muttered, pulling out my phone and shining the flashlight down into the hole. “Doyle?” I called.

  “I think I broke my foot,” he said cheerily from the bottom of the hole. “But you know what? I know everything will be okay, because you’re here. I’ve never felt that with anyone.”

  “Just be quiet,” I said. The rest of the boards seemed solid, and I got down on my stomach and looked down into the opening. Doyle waved at me, pupils totally dilated, and then stared off into the shadows. “Hey,” he said. “There’s a little tunnel down here. . . .”

  “Doyle, wait!” I hissed. “Do not go wandering around down there on a broken foot!”

  The boards creaked, and I lowered myself down before they gave way and I also ended up with something broken. Doyle smiled at me, pointing into the corner. “Ivy, look. We can all be together here. It’s going to be so beautiful.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said, following Doyle’s finger.

  Just as before, the sunlight picked up the glint of the gold signet ring embedded in the dark gray pebbles that made up the cavern floor. And just as before, I slapped a hand over my mouth to muffle a scream when I realized I was sharing the tiny space with at least one human skeleton.

  Chapter 23

  Like in my dream, I did what any sane human would do when trapped with a dead body—I tried to get the hell out of there. But Doyle was in no shape to move, and the narrow passage just led into darkness.

  I slid down to the gravel, folding my legs up to my chest. I was trapped here.

  My cell phone dug into my side, and I pulled it from my pocket, but I didn’t have any bars on the island, never mind underground. The screen blinked with a low-battery warning, and I turned it off. I could see all right, at least. I just didn’t want to see what was in front of me.