The Lighthouse Witches(78)

Luna considers briefly telling Cassie about her wayward youth, her years as a shoplifter, desperate to be caught for something, for someone to tell her why she’d been abandoned by her mother.

“You remember the folktale about wildlings?” she says after a long pause.

“Remember?” Cassie says. “Of course I bloody remember. It was drilled into us before we could talk.”

Luna cocks her head. “You still believe it?”

Cassie gives a small laugh. “Are you joking?”

“If I told you that Clover has a burn on her hip, a set of numbers—what would you think?”

Cassie blinks. “I’d say that was very bloody unfortunate and you should make sure she sees a doctor . . .”

“And the fact that she’s still a seven-year-old?”

A pause. “Luna. She cannot be Clover.”

“I think she’s a wildling.” She feels something change in her as she says it. Different than thinking it, she realizes it. Saying it aloud—she feels both relieved and sick to her stomach. How can she believe this?

Cassie’s face softens into pity. “You know it’s just a fairy tale. You of all people know . . .”

“I’m not saying I know how it all works,” Luna says, covering her face with her hands. “I’m just trying to connect the facts. But you know the stories. You can tell a wildling by the mark . . .”

Cassie sits back in her seat, her eyes wide. She clasps her hands and visibly considers her next words. “OK, so I remember that after Saffy and Clover went missing,” she says, “there was a rumor about you. People said you were a wildling.”

Luna feels her heart race. She tries to remember, but her mind is a whirlwind of images and sounds, cloudy with a thousand emotions. “A wildling.”

“Now do you see what a ridiculous idea that is?”

“Well, it’s obvious that I wasn’t.”

“?‘Obvious’ is a relative term.”

“Do you think that has anything to do with Brodie saying I was meant to be dead?” Luna says, and Cassie stares ahead, searching her own memories.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I really don’t know.”


II

“Are you all right, Clover?” Luna asks as they lie in the twin beds.

Clover nods, but she looks sad. “That man was scary.”

She means Brodie. “He won’t hurt you. I promise.”

“I thought we’d see Mummy here.”

“I’m sorry.”

“And the Longing,” Clover adds. “I don’t understand. Why is it like that?”

“That’s why we’re here,” Luna says. “To find answers.”

“Thank you,” Clover says, but she still seems sad.

Luna presses a hand to her belly, feeling the baby kick. She squeezes her eyes shut and breathes deep. She knows what has to be done. But it’s so, so hard.

“I was thinking we could take a drive,” she says in a thin voice.

“When?”

“Tomorrow. First thing. I thought . . . we could explore the woods.”

“Will Mummy be there?”

“I don’t know.”

Clover yawns, deeply. “OK.”

Clover turns over, stretching out a hand, brushing against Luna’s finger. And there it is again, the beginning of the headache that grows and grows until it feels her head might explode.

She squeezes her eyes tight, pressing the balls of her palms against them as though to stop them from exploding out of her head. She wants to cry out, but even amidst the agony of it she knows she mustn’t alarm Clover, or Cassie. She gets up and feels her way to the kitchen, hoping to find some kind of painkiller that will numb the pain. The cold on the ground floor of the house is instantly soothing, and so she makes her way to the front door, pulling it open and letting the chill of the night air wash over her.

As she looks out over the ocean in the distance, the headache gradually lifting, images swirl in her mind.

She remembers finding an odd shape on the bay by the Longing, a large black hump that looked like the sand had dropped to reveal a stone bank. When she had gotten closer, she’d spotted the white marks, the slits indicating gills, and gasped. It was the basking shark, Basil. He had beached, his gills opening and closing slowly as he struggled for breath. He was so large his own body weight was crushing him, and he looked like he was melting into the stand.

Mr. McPherson, the fisherman, had appeared with two buckets of water. He’d poured them over the shark.

“If we do this until the tide comes in, we might save him,” he’d said.

Luna had taken one of the buckets and run to the tide, scooping it up and tossing it over the shark. It was a phenomenal and strange sight. That enormous shark, long as a bus and helpless as a kitten.

She remembers scooping the water and dumping it over the shark until her arms ached. Finally, Mr. McPherson had said, “That’s enough, lass. Say your farewell.” They’d stood in silence for a moment, looking down at the huge body of the shark, his gray skin so rough that Luna had friction burns from where she’d accidently rubbed her arms against him while pouring water over him. He was more rock than fish, all thirty feet of him lying stretched out on the sand. She’d asked Mr. McPherson if they could lasso him somehow and get a boat to tug him back out to sea.