The Storm King(79)

“Where’re you going?”

“People to see, Tommy. Places to go.” Secrets to find.

“I’ll go with you.” Tom started to get up.

“Not this time.” Nate knew where he had to go, and he had to go there alone. He picked Tom’s phone off the floor and tossed it to him. Its screen blinked with texts and missed calls. “The Lake needs you.”

Tom sat amid the broken and sparkling ruins of his living room and stared up at him. Nate wondered what Tom saw when he looked at him. Did he see his friend, or did he see the Storm King? Did he see someone to love or someone to fear?

“I’ll have my phone if you need me,” Tom said.

“Okay.” Nate didn’t remind him that his own phone was dead. He stepped over the shattered coffee table and past the kitchen to the front door. With a turn of the door handle, the wind burst into the room. The rain had let up for now, but the sky was a fury of thunderheads. Branches tumbled across lawns, and dead leaves swarmed like locusts above fallen trees.

Tom had followed Nate to the door. Nate handed over the car keys he’d pocketed. In the storm light, Tom’s eyes were bloodshot, his skin a patchwork of flush and pallor. But his voice was the same as it’d always been.

“Be careful,” he said.





Fifteen

This was supposed to be the lull in the hurricane, but Medea still dismembered Nate’s umbrella within minutes, pinwheeling its cap down the street like a tumbleweed. He shivered within the carapace of his raincoat as the storm lashed him.

Fallen trees, downed power lines, and the barrage of the gale made his trek to the water’s edge twice its fair-weather length.

In her hospital in Gracefield, Grams was cut off.

Without his phone, Meg and Livvy were unreachable.

But shrunk in her casket, Lucy was less lost than she’d been. The fractures of their graduation night had shifted, and new gaps in its story were exposed. These would have to be delved into no matter where they took him. No matter what they revealed. The way out was the way through.

Tom’s secret had unnerved Nate. Of everyone from the old days, he’d thought Tom was the one he could most count on.

What else had he gotten wrong?

The problem was that people were capable of anything. Horrors and virtues churned inside us, and to know which of these trumped the others at any moment would be to sense every texture of the future. Nate used to know this.



Translucent dapplings of purple and red petals covered the base of the Night Ship’s barricade like fragments of a destroyed mosaic. The deluge had displaced husks of dead glow sticks from the children’s shrine. They bobbed in troughs of water that swelled above an overflowing storm drain.

If Emma was with Adam back on graduation night, then Nate’s old enemy had an alibi. The files in the chief’s closet might hold clues to other suspects, but Nate would need Tom to go back there, and his friend was currently in no such condition.

This left only one place for Nate to look for the answers he needed.

His wingtips slipped and skidded as he scaled the barricade. The old wood was soft under his feet. More of the pier’s planks had fallen away since Nate had last been there. The boardwalk was as buckled and gapped as a brawler’s smile. The season had brought slick moss to its boards, so he took his time crossing it. He still didn’t like the lake.

The froth of the gray water resembled fins and spines of creatures thrashing just below its surface. It was a longer walk than he remembered. The hurricane, his exhaustion, the events of the morning, and the way memories of the past bled into the present gave the world a hypnagogic quality. Nate imagined walking these broken planks across the decades. Into not only his own past, but the history of the Night Ship itself. Back to the bloody days of old Morton Strong. Back to the cruel heart of Just June’s Century Room. Into whatever terror struck Lucy in her last moment. Walking to the Night Ship was to be caught in a purgatory between land and sea, history and future, suspicion and knowing, without ever getting an inch closer to home.

Then he was there, in front of the warped and broken door to the Night Ship’s promenade.



The hall was a cacophony of dripping water, whispering drafts, and all the familiar echoes of the ruined place. The old pier’s damp, rot-steeped air embraced Nate like he was its own wayward son. He hadn’t been here since the day Lucy had vanished.

That morning, Tom had pulled Nate from the lake. Dragged him to the boat launch as if he were himself a drowned body. Every bit of energy Nate possessed had been spent diving and screaming for Lucy. Tom was able to heave him onto the launch’s steps only when Nate had nothing left.

He remembered some things with intense clarity: the chill of the lake on his skin, the sway of the canoe beneath him, the look on Johnny’s face when he first saw him.

After hauling Nate to the launch, Tom had made him wait in the boat as he loaded it up with the lanterns, sleeping bags, and coolers they’d kept at the pier. Dawn had fully broken by then, but light never reached the waters under the Night Ship. Nate stayed in the canoe, clutching the wet kimono wrap, staring at the ink-black surface of the lake, willing Lucy to emerge and knowing with absolute certainty that she would not.

Once Tom gathered their things, he paddled them back to the Vanhoutens’ dock. He seated Nate in the gazebo while he woke Johnny. When the chief returned to pick them up, Tom spun a story about how they’d decided to search the shore with the canoe, just in case, and that’s when they’d found the kimono wrap. The official account of the disappearance of Lucy Bennett began.