Spells for Forgetting(97)

“How would it work?” Zachariah asked. Finally, things were moving in the right direction.

“Jake says August had a ferry ticket for the morning. If anyone comes looking, we’ll say he left town. Another Salt gone missing. He disappeared before. No one will question it.”

“So, what? You’re just going to go pull him out of his bed?” Nixie scoffed.

“We don’t need to.” I lifted my chin. “Jake’s already got him up at Wilke’s Pointe.”

“What?” Bernard’s voice filled the room.

Nixie tipped her head back, staring at the ceiling. “Jesus Christ, Leoda.”

“Grabbed him this afternoon. This can be clean and tidy. Quick.”

“There’s nothing tidy about it. He’s got a job in Portland. Friends. People who will come looking for him,” Nixie said.

“Fine. Then we play it differently this time. Make it look like he took his own life.”

She arched an eyebrow at me. “And why would he do that?”

“Guilt,” I answered. “We have more than enough evidence to convince anyone of what he did to Lily.” I took their silence as a good sign. “Bernard and Jake will take him up to the cliffs at Wilke’s Pointe. We leave the body to be spotted by a fisherman. They’re in that cove every morning this time of year. Nixie, you can go to the house and make sure there’s nothing there that will complicate things. Zach, you keep an eye on Noah until this is all done. We need him to believe the story.”

“And Emery?” Nixie asked.

Emery. She was always the problem. Getting between my plans for Lily and August. Never giving up the search for him after he left. She’d been ruining things from the beginning. But I would never convince Nixie that she had to go, too.

“We’ll have this taken care of before she wakes up in the morning. She mourned him once. She’ll do it again.”

I waited for more questions, but they didn’t come. The six of us looked at each other, silent. Jake, Bernard, and Nixie still had a lot of years left between them, but Zachariah and I were old now, white hair and wrinkles. Aching bones. Still, there was one thing that bound us to the task—the island.

We’d all made sacrifices for Saoirse. No one more than me.

I found my own eyes in the mirror that hung over the dresser and the light glinted in them. When the words finally made it to my lips, I could feel the decision settling in their minds. “All in favor?”





Fifty-Eight


    AUGUST


Smoke drifted past the open doorway, a spinning plume of white against the black sky.

I couldn’t see Jake, but the butt of his cigarette glowed amber in the darkness as he took a final drag and flicked it onto the rocks.

Behind him, a sea of stars stretched and disappeared on the horizon, where the water touched the sky. The bluff overlooked the city far in the distance, and we’d come up here as kids when we didn’t want to be found. We weren’t the only ones, I realized.

My wrists burned beneath the ropes he’d tied behind me, and the small wooden chair was like a blade against my back. It was nothing to the ache in my head where he’d hit me, or the sharp pain in my ribs every time I drew breath. At least one of them was broken.

“Are you going to tell me what we’re doing up here?” I said, watching him pace before the door.

He stopped, scratching his jaw before he finally turned toward me. It wasn’t the same Jake I’d grown up with who looked at me from across the room. The one who’d left an ice bucket of fish on our porch at least once a week or the one who I found fixing my mom’s truck early in the morning before she woke up. There was a different man behind his eyes now.

“I’m not gonna play games with you, August.”

“Really? That’s a relief. Because that’s what you’ve been doing since the night of the fire.”

His eyes hardened, focusing. That pissed him off. Good.

He stepped inside and closed the door. The tiny room was outfitted with two armchairs before a cold fireplace and a bookshelf built into the wall. It was one of the oldest houses on the island, erected by someone up the Blackwood line.

He sank into one of the chairs, setting both hands on his knees. I couldn’t help but notice that his eyes were clear for once. Whatever he was doing, he was doing it lucid.

“You’ve made a real mess of all this, August. You should have listened to me.”

“This place was fucked up long before I was born, Jake.”

It was true. Saoirse was like poison. A thick, creeping sickness. And at the heart of it all was the goddamn orchard. My mother had never been able to see that, either.

Jake’s eyes ran over me, landing on the trail of blood that had dried stiff on the shoulder of my white T-shirt. I could feel it like scales on my ear and neck.

“It’s not the first time someone’s beat the shit out of me,” I said flatly. “But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

He stared at me, clearly uncomfortable.

I smirked. “I thought so. But you never did anything about it, did you? You’re good at looking the other way when you want to.”

“I figured if you needed my help, you would ask for it.”

I swallowed hard against the burn in my throat. Because he was right. I knew that if I had gone to him, he would have helped me. He’d been there for me and my mom for as long as I could remember. But I hadn’t gone to Jake because I didn’t want my mom to get involved. Maybe he didn’t, either.