In the winter months, he’d colonize the common room at the end of the hall. Set up a table under the skylight and work on the tiny scale models of ships that he then fed into bottles. He’d started selling them online a few years ago and had quite a following. Orders that could keep him busy for years if he wanted to. Prices he could charge that would give him enough money to leave this place behind, these people, and strike out on his own.
And yet . . .
He made sure the door was shut and locked behind him, then reached under his bed to pull out a box. An old milk crate, it was the only thing on hand when he’d gone into the Craft Shop and found his life diagrammed on the wall. Not only his life but all of them, the MacAllisters, and Amy, and Owen Bowery of all people, that punk kid who became a rock star. And probably a bunch of others, but he hadn’t had time to check.
He’d known what it was even before he’d looked at it carefully. Mr. MacAllister’s files, the ones he’d told Sean about but never showed him. The ones he was always working on late at night, that he’d tuck away if anyone ever came into the room.
“All in good time, son,” he used to say.
Mr. MacAllister said that about a lot of things. Sean getting a permanent part of camp, the deed to the Island, the certainty that he could choose to stay or leave without deference to anyone.
“All in good time.”
Only that time never came, and now, despite the vote the night before, Sean knew he was going to end up the loser. He wasn’t going to get what he wanted. He never did. He watched life—her—from the sidelines, and all he got was the leftovers. Even Amanda had been that way. Her attention was revenge on someone else.
Sean sorted the material into piles. He didn’t know, exactly, what made him take the papers when he’d seen what Liddie and Kate were doing in the Craft Shop. He only knew he had to act fast.
He’d been walking up from the beach when he’d seen Buster standing outside the building, his sign that someone was inside. He’d moved quietly and looked in the side window, signaling to Buster to lay down flat. He watched them long enough to realize what they were doing and then he decided. He needed time alone with the papers to figure out what they meant. If they were dangerous or could be ignored. When they came looking for them, he’d deal with that then, if he had to.
He’d thought of the swimming drill and had rung the bell. Buster had gone bounding into the woods, and the MacAllisters had gathered at the lodge. When everyone went to change, he’d taken the papers down as carefully as he could and stuffed them into the milk crate. Then he’d climbed out the back window and skirted through the woods to get to the rear entrance of the lodge without being seen. He’d dropped the papers in his room, then hurried back to the water for the drill.
That had been a mistake; the water was too cold, and they were lucky only one person got hypothermia. But Kate was going to be okay, and in a way, this was her fault, or Liddie’s at least. If she wasn’t always snooping, digging into things that didn’t concern her, then so many things would be different.
Mr. MacAllister had been spying on them. He knew that already. He’d even gone along with him on a couple of recognizance trips, as Mr. MacAllister called them.
“I like to know what my kids are up to,” he’d say, his eyes twinkling. “Care to join me?”
“Why not just ask them?” Sean had dared to say once.
“But that wouldn’t be half the fun.”
Sean had gone with him without any more protest.
The truth was, he didn’t mind so much when the trips involved looking into what the twins were doing or Ryan. It was when they were spying on Margaux that Sean felt his chest tighten and his hands itch. He couldn’t figure out what it was that Mr. MacAllister wanted to find all those years, but now he knew. He was trying to solve what had happened to Amanda, and he thought, somehow, that information about their present would explain the past.
Was that it? Because even that, the bigness of it, the task, didn’t explain the files Mr. MacAllister had on him, or Amy, or the random campers he seemed to follow. What could this possibly have to do with figuring out what had happened to Amanda? Sean had never even heard Mr. MacAllister speak about that, except once, briefly, after they’d gotten back from cleaning up the mess Ryan had made when Stacey Kensington died. Mr. MacAllister had poured himself some of that cheap wine he made and asked Sean if he thought that some people had badness in them. If they were born that way.
“Like the devil?”
“If you want to be religious about it. I’m thinking more of Macbeth. How he was cursed. Do you ever feel cursed, Sean?”
“Why would I?”
“Son of a whore, finding your mother like that.”
“Don’t say that about my mother.”
“I apologize. It’s been, as they say, a day.”
Sean had wanted to hit Mr. MacAllister that night, maybe take him from behind with a frying pan. Wham! Sean had these violent thoughts sometimes. But then Mrs. MacAllister came in and thanked Sean for helping with Ryan—she didn’t know what she’d do without him—and he’d gone back to this very room and fallen asleep to the sound of the oscillating fan above his head.
The papers were now in piles on the floor. Though he was curious about all of them, he picked up his pile first and sorted it again into chronological order. Mr. MacAllister had taught him to do that. Chronology was how you found patterns, explanations, he’d told him more than once. When you had a set of data that you wanted to make sense of, this was the best first place to start.
Only, now that he’d organized it by date, it didn’t make any more sense than it had before. His whole life was here. If he flipped through it, it would be like one of those do-it-yourself cartoons—a cartoon baby growing into a larger cartoon man as the pages flicked past. His birth announcement. A photo of his mother holding him at a few weeks. Receipts for a day care he didn’t remember attending. His report cards, all of them, the bad grades circled. A canceled check to his mother from a name he didn’t recognize. Were these all his mother’s things? Had Mr. MacAllister kept them all this time, intending to give them to him someday? That didn’t seem likely given the other things in the pile. Several pictures of Sean standing on the fringes of a scene with Margaux in it, looking at her. A timeline of that night on the Island. It began with the lantern ceremony on the beach. He remembered how the lanterns lit up the sky, how the night felt full of possibilities. It ended with Amanda being found on Secret Beach.
In the middle were important gaps. Things he’d tried so long to forget, to wash the shame of them away by living this monk’s life.
•9:00 p.m.—Amanda, Margaux, Mary, & campers travel to the Island (Sean takes them)
•9:30–11:00 p.m.—Campfire, bedtime
•11:30 p.m.—Ryan arrives
Sean picked up a pencil and filled in some of the gaps.
•12:30 a.m.—Ryan leaves
•1:00 a.m.—Ryan arrives at camp
•1:05 a.m.—Sean rows to the Island
Amanda
July 23, 1998—1:30 a.m.
“Don’t scream,” he said again. “It’s Sean.”
Even though my heart was galloping, I felt my body go slack when he said his name. Sean. It was only Sean. I was okay. I wasn’t going to be dragged off into the woods never to be heard from again.
He lowered his hand. “Sorry, did I scare you?”
“You did.”
“I didn’t want you to scream and wake everyone.”
I turned around. He was wearing long pants, a Macaw sweatshirt, a baseball cap, and a headlamp. The light stung my eyes. I must’ve been in a far-off place not to notice him approaching.
“Can you put that out?”
“Yeah, course.”
He clicked it, and it was dark again. The truth was, I didn’t care about the light in
my eyes. I cared about the light on my eyes. That it would show that I’d been crying.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I came to check on you guys.”
Margaux, he meant. His crush on Margaux was of longer standing than mine on Ryan. Though I was over that now, I decided. I’d have to be. I wasn’t going to let Ryan MacAllister ruin the rest of my summer or any other part of my life. Not for an hour of kisses.
Maybe that’s all it would take for Sean? To have Margaux finally kiss him, then change her mind?
“We’re fine.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Truly.”
He looked at the lake. “Those guys were out on their boat again.”
“Which guys?”
“The ones who’ve been buzzing around the swim dock and the water-ski beach.”
He meant the group of college guys who were staying on the other side of the lake. They’d noticed Margaux a few weeks ago when she was lifeguarding in her tankini. They’d tried to beach their boat, and Sean had run them off.
“How would they even know we were here?”
“Can’t risk it. Guys like that.”
“They’re harmless.”
I sat down on the rock where I’d sat with Ryan. Forever ago. “Did you . . .”
“See Ryan?”
“Yeah.”
“I watched him row back. That’s what made me come to this side of the Island. He was visiting you, I guess?”
“There isn’t anybody else here but his sisters and a bunch of twelve-year-olds.”
“Good point.”
He sat next to me. He felt solid where his leg touched mine. The difference between twenty-five and seventeen. Was it as big as it felt sometimes? Would I be that solid when I was twenty-five? That firmly rooted in my life?
“Ryan’s a jerk,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Want to tell me what happened?”
I looked out at the water. Maybe telling Sean would help. Finally purge the thoughts and feelings from my body. It was worth a try.
“He came to meet me . . .”
I told him most of it. How I waited. How he was late. How we started to fool around and then he changed his mind and blamed it on Margaux.
“But that was crap, because Margaux gave me her blessing or whatever.”
I felt a bit breathless. Telling it like that hadn’t made me feel better. I was embarrassed. I wished I could take the words back, put them back inside me, where I could delete them one by one.
“You won’t tell anyone?” I asked a second man that night.
“No, of course not. Only . . .”
“What?”
“I . . . Maybe it is Margaux’s fault.”
“How could this be Margaux’s fault?”
“I didn’t think much of this at the time, but a couple of weeks back, Ryan said something to Margaux about how . . . attractive you’d gotten, and she laughed. Then she got all serious with him and told him to stay far, far away from you.”
“She did?”
“Yeah, sorry.”
“Maybe she was joking?”
“Nah. She wasn’t joking. She was looking out for you.”
“Looking out for me.”
“Yeah. I mean, Ryan’s no good. Even Margaux knows that.”
I felt rage building inside me. “What business is it of hers though?”
“What’s that?”
“So what if I want to do something stupid with Ryan? I mean, did I stop her from sleeping with that idiot Simon Vauclair last summer? No, I did not.”
Sean flinched next to me. Shit. He didn’t know about that. Aw, well, fuck it. Fuck it. And fuck Margaux too.
“Sorry, you didn’t know.”
“It’s okay. I kind of did.”
“She’s no good for you either.”
“I know.”
I stretched out my legs. My foot clinked against something. I got down on my knees and moved my hands around, trying to find it.
“What are you doing?”
“Hold on.”
I found it against a rock. The flask Ryan had brought, forgotten in his haste to get away from me. The cap was still on, the insides sloshing half-full. Good.
“What you got there?”
“Just what we need.”
I sat on the ground with my back against the rock. I held up the flask so Sean could see it.
“You want?”
“That’s probably not a good idea.”
“No, it’s a great idea.”
I wanted to change the way I felt, and this seemed like the easiest way. I screwed off the cap, a mini tumbler.
“Turn on your headlamp, will you?”
There was a click, and then light. I poured carefully into the cap and handed the flask to Sean.
I raised the tumbler. “What should we toast to?”
“I have no idea.”
“To us, then,” I said, feeling silly and bold. “The MacAllister rejects.”
“To us,” Sean said and mock clinked the flask to the tiny cup in my hand.
And then we drank.
Amanda
Margaux
Ryan
Mary
Kate & Liddie
Sean
9:00 p.m.
Lantern ceremony
Lantern ceremony
Lantern ceremony
10:00 p.m.
On the Island
On the Island
On the Island
Crash boat
11:00 p.m.
Back Beach
Back Beach
Back Beach
On the Island
Midnight
Back Beach
Back Beach
1:00 a.m.
Back Beach
Camp
Back Beach
6:00 a.m.
Secret Beach
Secret Beach
CHAPTER 30
HUDDLE UP
Margaux
When Ryan and Liddie got back from wherever they’d been, Margaux decided it was time to take charge. Kate was going to live. Mary had a boyfriend. What else didn’t she know? The only way they were going to solve this thing was if they pooled their resources.
She went into the office and gathered up what she could, then dragged a whiteboard from the back of the lodge to the fireplace.
“What are you doing?” Kate asked. She still had a tinge of blue around her lips, as if she’d drawn them in with lip liner.
“We need to huddle up.”
“Huddle up?” Liddie said. “Like in football?”
“Okay, so maybe that’s not the right term.”
“Are we voting again?” Mary asked, eyeing the markers in Margaux’s hand.
“What?” Ryan said. “No, please . . .”
“Not yet,” Margaux said. “I think we need to do something else first.”
“What’s that?” Sean asked, coming down the stairs. He gave Margaux a guilty look, then broke eye contact. Margaux felt nervous. What if one of them had hurt Amanda? Even if she’d made assumptions about Ryan
for all these years, they were only assumptions. Feelings. It wasn’t proof of something she didn’t know if she could accept. It wasn’t evidence of something that might throw her world into chaos. But she’d promised Ryan, and she owed it to Amanda.
Margaux set up the whiteboard near the fireplace, wiping off the leftover Pictionary sketches and staff meeting reminders.
July 22–23, 1998, she wrote across the top.
She made six columns and headed them with their names: Amanda, Margaux, Ryan, Mary, Kate/Liddie, Sean.
“You’re missing someone,” Ryan said. “Two people, in fact.”
“Who?”
“Mom and Dad.”
“Ryan!” Kate said. “That’s disgusting.”
“Why is it more disgusting than any of the rest of us having done it?”
Ryan stared at Kate as they all watched her struggle to come up with an answer. “I don’t know. But if they’d done it, why would Dad put that condition in his will? That doesn’t make any sense. Besides, what reason could they possibly have to do that to Amanda?”
“But I have a reason to? That’s what you think, isn’t it?”
“Ryan,” Margaux said. “Please.”
He backed off. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay. Look,” Margaux said. “This whole situation is nuts, but Mom and Dad weren’t on the Island that night. They weren’t even at camp, remember? They were at that camping association meeting and only got back the next morning. Sean was in charge. So they’re out of it. It’s only us. We owe it to Ryan to figure out whether he did it. Or whether it was someone else.”
Liddie came and stood in front of the whiteboard. “So what’s this?”
“A way to figure it out.”
Margaux picked up another marker and drew horizontal lines this time, making a series of boxes. Then, in the left-hand boxes she wrote the time.
9:00 p.m.
10:00 p.m.
11:00 p.m.
All the way down to 6:00 a.m.
I'll Never Tell Page 18
