FOUR
The moonlight makes an eerie path down to the water’s edge.
Bo hesitates beside the bonfire, resting his hands on his knees, his mouth an even, unbreakable line. He doesn’t believe any of this. But then he stands up, leaving his empty beer can in the sand, and follows me down to the shore where people are huddled together. Several girls are totally soaked, shivering, hair dripping down their backs.
“Shhh,” a girl whispers, and the group falls totally silent. Totally still.
Several seconds pass, a cool wind slides across the water, and I find myself holding my breath. Each summer it’s the same, yet I listen and wait like I’m about to hear it for the first time. The start of an orchestra, the seconds of anticipation before the curtain lifts.
And then it comes, soft and languid like a summer day, the murmuring of a song whose words are indistinguishable. Some say it’s French, others Portuguese, but no one has ever translated it because it’s not a real language. It’s something else. It curls up off the ocean and slips into our ears. It’s gentle and alluring, like a mother whispering a bedtime riddle to a child. And as if on cue, the two girls standing closest to the waterline take several staggering steps into the sea, unable to resist.
But a group of boys go in after them and drag them back out. The time for dares has passed. There will be no more coaxing girls into the harbor, no more taunts to swim all the way out then back again. The danger is suddenly stark and real.
The lulling melody coils around me, fingers sliding across my skin and down my throat, tugging at me. Begging me to respond. I close my eyes and take a step forward before I even realize what I’ve done. But a hand—solid and warm—grabs ahold of mine. “Where you going?” Bo asks in a hush as he pulls me back to his side.
I shake my head. I don’t know.
He doesn’t release my hand, but squeezes it tighter, like he’s afraid to let me go. “Is it really coming from the water?” he asks, his voice low, still facing the dark, dangerous sea, like he doesn’t believe his own ears.
I nod, drowsy suddenly. The alcohol in my body has made me weak, more susceptible to the call of their song. “Now you know why the tourists come: to hear the sisters’ song, to see if it’s real,” I say. The warmth of his palm pulses against mine, and I feel myself leaning into him, his firm shoulder an anchor keeping me from toppling over.
“How long will it last?”
“Until each of the three sisters has lured a girl into the water and taken her body.” I clench my jaw. “Day and night the ocean will sing. Sometimes it takes weeks, sometimes only a few days. All three sisters could find bodies tonight if girls keep wading out into the bay.”
“Does it scare you?” I realize we’re the last two people standing at the water’s edge—everyone else has gone back up to the safety of the bonfire, away from the tempting harbor—but his hand is still in mine, keeping me rooted to shore.
“Yes,” I admit, the word sending a shiver down to my tailbone. “I usually don’t come to the Swan party. I stay home and lock myself in my room.” When my dad was still alive, he would stay up all night sitting in a chair beside the front door to be sure I didn’t get drawn from my room—in case the urge to swim out into the sea was too great for me to resist. And now that he’s gone, I sleep with headphones on and a pillow over my head each night until the singing finally stops.
I believe that I’m stronger than most girls—that I’m not so easily fooled by the sisters’ ethereal voices. My mother used to say that we are like the Swan sisters—she and I. Misunderstood. Different. Outcasts living alone on the island, reading fortunes in the cosmos of tea leaves. But I wonder if it’s even possible to be normal in a place like Sparrow. Perhaps we all have some oddity, some strangeness we keep hidden along our edges, things we see that we can’t explain, things we wish for, things we run from.
“Some girls want to be taken,” I say in a near whisper, because it’s hard for me to imagine wanting something like that. “Like it’s a badge of honor. Others claim that they’ve been taken in summers past, but there’s no way to prove it. Most likely they just want the attention.”
The Swan sisters have always stolen the bodies of girls my age—the same age the sisters were when they died. As if they desire to relive that moment in time, even if just briefly.
Bo blows out a breath then turns and looks back up at the bonfire, where the party has resumed in full upheaval. The goal of tonight is to stay awake until sunrise, to mark the start of summer, and for all the girls to survive without being inhabited by a Swan sister. But I sense Bo’s hesitation—that maybe he’s had enough.
“I think I’ll head back to my camp and find a new place to sleep.” He releases my hand, and I rub my palms together, feeling the residual warmth. A spire of unnerving heat coils up the center of my chest into my rib cage.
“Are you still looking for work?” I ask.
His lips press flat, as if he’s contemplating the next few words, sifting them around in his mouth. “You were right about no one wanting to hire an outsider.”
“Well, maybe I was wrong about not needing any help.” I let out a breath of air. Maybe it’s because he’s an outsider like my dad, because I know this town can be cruel and unaccepting. Maybe I know he won’t last long without someone to keep him safely away from the harbor once all three sisters have found bodies and begin their revenge on the town. Or maybe it’s because it would also be a relief to have some help with the lighthouse. I know almost nothing about him, but it feels as if he’s always been here. And it might be nice having someone else on the island, someone who I can talk to—someone who isn’t fading into a slow, numbing madness. Living with my mom is like living with a shadow. “We can’t pay you much, but it’s a free place to stay and free meals.”
Dad has never officially been declared deceased, so there’s never been a life insurance check waiting for us in the mailbox. And shortly after he vanished, Mom stopped reading tea leaves, so the money stopped coming in. Thankfully, Dad had some savings. Enough that we’ve been able to survive on it these last three years—and it will probably get us through another two before we’ll need to find an alternative source of income.
Bo scratches at the back of his neck, turning his head slightly away. I know he doesn’t have any other options, but still he’s considering it.
“All right. No guarantees on how long I’ll stay.”
“Deal.”
* * *
I grab my shoes from beside the fire and find Rose talking to Heath Belzer. “I’m going home,” I tell her, and she reaches out for my arm.
“No,” she says in an exaggerated slur. “You can’t.”
“If you want to come with me, I’ll walk you home,” I say. She lives only four blocks from here, but far enough in the dark that I don’t want her doing it alone. And drunk.
“I can walk her,” Heath offers, and I look up at the soft, agreeable features of his face. Loose grin, dark eyes, reddish-brown hair that’s always spilling across his forehead so he’s constantly brushing it back out of the way. He’s cute, likable, even if the curves of his face have that mildly dopey look. Heath Belzer is one of the good ones. He has four older sisters who’ve all graduated and moved away from Sparrow, but his whole life he’s been known as Baby Heath, the kid who was beaten up by girls his entire childhood. And I once saw him save a blue jay that got trapped in the science lab at school by spending his entire lunch period trying to catch it then finally setting it free through an open window.
“You won’t ditch her?” I ask Heath.
“I’ll make sure she gets home,” he says, looking me square in the eyes. “I promise.”
“If anything happens to her—” I warn.
“Nothing’s going to happen to me,” Rose mumbles, squeezing my hand and pulling me into a hug. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” she whispers with whiskey-stained breath into my ear.
“All right. And no swimming.”
“No swimming!” she repeats loudly, lifting her beer into the air, and a chorus of echoes pass through the crowd as everyone begins shouting in unison, “No swimming! ” I can hear the chant all the way down the beach as Bo and I walk toward the bluff to retrieve his backpack, intermixing with the singing of distant voices blowing in with the rising tide.
* * *
Otis and Olga are waiting on the dock when I steer the skiff slowly up alongside it and kill the engine. We motored across the harbor in the dark, without even a flashlight to mark our path through the wreckage, the inviting whispers of the Swan sisters sliding languidly over the water so that it felt like we were being swallowed by their song.
I secure the ropes to the dock then bend down to stroke each cat’s slender back, both of them slightly damp and probably unhappy that I’m returning so late. “Did you wait all night?” I whisper down to them then lift my head to see Bo stepping onto the dock, carrying his backpack in one hand. He cranes his head up, looking across the island to the lighthouse. The beacon of light illuminates us briefly before continuing its clockwise cycle out over the Pacific.
In the dark, Lumiere Island feels eerie and macabre. A place of ghosts and mossy hollows, where long-dead sailors surely haunt the reeds and wind-scoured trees. But it’s not the island you should fear—it’s the waters surrounding it.
“It’s not as creepy in daylight,” I assure Bo, passing my father’s old sailboat, the Windsong, bobbing on the other side of the wood dock, sails down, unmoved for the last three years. My father didn’t name the boat. It was called the Windsong when he purchased it ten years ago from a man who moored it south of Sparrow in a small seaside harbor. But the name Windsong had always seemed fitting, considering the voices that rise up from the sea each summer.
Otis and Olga trot after me, and Bo falls into step behind them.
The island is shaped like a half-moon with the flat side facing inland and the opposite side curved by the endless waves crashing against its banks. A two-story, robin’s-egg-blue house—where my mom and I live—stands near the lighthouse, and a collection of smaller buildings are scattered across the island, built and torn down and added on to over the years. There is a wood shed and a toolshed and a greenhouse long since abandoned, and there are two cottages that serve as living quarters—Old Fisherman’s Cottage and Anchor Cottage—and I lead Bo to the newer of the two, a place where staff was once housed, cooks and maintenance men, when such people were required to keep this place up and running.
“Have you always lived on the island?” he asks from the darkness as we follow the winding, sometimes broken wood-slated path up through the interior of the island, the air foggy and cool.
“I was born here.”
“On the island?” he asks.
“My mom would have preferred to have had me at the hospital in Newport an hour away or at least at the clinic in Sparrow, but out here fate is determined by the sea, and a winter storm blew in, covering the island with a foot of snow and making the harbor a complete whiteout. So she delivered me at the house.” The dizzying swirl of alcohol still thumps through me, and my head feels roomy and unfocused. “My dad said I was meant for this place,” I explain. “That the island didn’t want to let me go.”
I may belong here on the island, but my father never did. The town always hated that an outsider purchased the island and the lighthouse—even if my mom was a local.
Dad was a freelance architect. He designed summer homes along the coast, and even a new library up in Pacific Cove. Before that, he worked at an architectural firm in Portland after he and Mom got married. But Mom always missed Sparrow—her hometown—and she wanted desperately to move back. Even though she had no family here, her parents were long dead and she was an only child, it had always felt like home to her. So when they saw the listing for Lumiere Island for sale, including the lighthouse, which was going to be decommissioned by the state—no longer of use since Sparrow was not a large shipping harbor anymore—they both knew it was exactly what they wanted. The lighthouse was a historic structure—one of the first buildings in town—and local fishermen still needed it to navigate into the harbor. It was perfect. Dad had even planned to renovate the old farmhouse someday—fix it up when he had the time, make it ours—but he never got the chance.
When he disappeared, the police came out to the island, filed a report, and then did nothing. The townspeople didn’t rally together, didn’t organize search parties, didn’t climb aboard their fishing boats to scan the harbor. To them, he had never belonged here in the first place. For this, a part of me hates this town, this place, and these people for being so callous. They fear anyone and anything that isn’t them. Just like they feared the Swan sisters two hundred years ago . . . and they killed them for being different.
We turn right, away from the glowing lights of the main house, and walk deeper into the unlit center of the island, until we reach the small stone cottage.
ANCHOR COTTAGE is written in letters formed out of frayed fishing rope then nailed to the wood door. It isn’t locked, and thankfully when I flick on the light switch just inside the front door, a floor lamp across the room blinks on.
Otis and Olga zip past my feet into the cottage, curious about the building, which they’ve rarely had the opportunity to explore. It’s cold and dank and there is a mustiness that can’t be cleaned away.
In the kitchen I flip on the switch beside the sink and a light shivers on overhead. I kneel down and grab the power cord for the refrigerator and plug it into an outlet in the wall. Instantly it begins to hum. A small bedroom is situated just off the living room; a peeling wood dresser is against one wall and a metal bed frame sits beneath a window. There is a mattress, but no pillows or blankets. “I’ll bring you sheets and bedding tomorrow,” I tell him.
“I have a sleeping bag.” He drops his backpack on the floor just inside the bedroom doorway. “I’ll be fine.”
“There’s wood inside the shed just up the path if you want to start a fire. There’s no food in the kitchen, but we have plenty up at the main house. You can come up in the morning for breakfast.”
“Thanks.”
“I wish it weren’t so . . .” I’m not sure what I want to say, how to apologize for it being so dark and mildewed.
“It’s better than sleeping on the beach,” he says before I can locate the right words, and I smile, feeling suddenly exhausted and light-headed and in need of sleep.
“See you in the morning,” I say.
He doesn’t say anything else, even though I stand mute for a moment too long, thinking he might. And then I turn, my head swaying, and slip out the door.
Otis and Olga follow me out, and we trudge up the slope to the main house, where I left the back porch light on.