Vanishing Girls(69)

“A bar called what?” Parker’s voice sounds distant now, thinner. He’s outside. He’s hurrying across the grass, holding his cell phone to his shoulder with his chin, rifling through his jeans for his keys. “Nick, are you there?”

“Oh my God.” I’m clutching my phone so tightly, my knuckles ache.

Just then my phone cuts out, powering down completely.

“Shit.” Cursing out loud makes me feel better. “Shit, shit, shit.” Then I remember Dara’s phone and feel a surge of hope. Keeping one hand on the wheel, I feel around for it in the cup holder, but come up with nothing but an ancient mass of gum, papered together and stuck to the back of a quarter. I reach over to run a hand along the passenger seat, increasingly desperate. Nothing.

Just then an animal—a raccoon or a possum, it’s too dark to tell—shoots out from the underbrush and freezes, eyes glittering, directly in the path of my wheels. I jerk the wheel hard into the next lane without checking for cars, expecting to feel a hard thump. After a second, I regain control, correcting my steering before I can plunge past the guardrail and straight past the darkened beachfront houses and into the water. When I look in the rearview mirror, I see a dark shape bolt across the road. Safe, then.

Still, I can’t shake loose that spike of panic, the terror of being out of control, of heading over the brink. I must have left Dara’s phone at home when I went inside to look through her room. That means I really am alone. The answers are all there, down on that lonely stretch of beach between Beamer’s and the accident site, where the currents make it deadly to swim: the answers to what happened to Madeline Snow, and what happened to change my sister; the answers to what happened on that night four months ago, when we went sailing off the edge of the earth and into the darkness.

And a small, persistent voice in my head keeps speaking up, begging me to turn back, telling me I’m not ready for the truth.

But I ignore it, and keep going.





Dara


2:02 a.m.

From the outside, the lighthouse looks abandoned. It rises above the construction scaffolding like a finger pointing to the moon. The narrow windows are boarded up with wood bleached a dull gray, and signs declare the whole place off-limits. WARNING, one of them reads, HARD HAT AREA ONLY. But there has been no construction here, not for a long time; even this sign is streaked with salt and warped from weather, graffitied with somebody’s tag.

I should have brought a flashlight.

I don’t remember how to get in—only that there is a way in, a secret door, like a passage to another world.

I circle the beach, slipping a little on the rocks. In the distance, beyond the boulders, I can see Beamer’s lit up, squatting on the shore like a glistening insect, and every so often I hear a car go by on the highway, see a section of beach and stone get lit up by a fast sweep of headlights, though I’m concealed from view by the thick, gnarled hedges of beach grass and pigface that grow up near the divider.



The tide is up. Black mud bubbles up between the stones, and waves foam not four feet from where I stand, forming pools between the rocks whenever they recede. It’s a lonely place, a place no one would think to investigate—and yet, less than a thousand feet down the road the lights and chaos of East Norwalk begin.

I duck underneath the construction scaffolding, running a hand along the curve of the lighthouse, paint splintering under my fingers. The only door is boarded up, like all the windows. Still, I keep circling. I’ve been here before. There must be a way in. Unless . . .

The thought comes to me suddenly. Unless Andre, knowing the cops are getting closer, has covered his tracks.

But almost the instant I think it, my fingers hit something—an irregularity, a minuscule break in the wood. It’s so dark beneath the scaffolding I can barely make out my hands, groping along the surface of the lighthouse, a place that has been patched over and nailed shut, as if long ago a hurricane tore out a chunk of the wall and it was only hastily repaired. I push. The wood gives a quarter of an inch, groaning a little when I lean against it.

There’s a door here: carved deliberately out of the wall, then made to look like it has been boarded up. But no matter how much I push, it won’t release. Could it be locked from inside? I run my fingers against the nearly invisible seam, crying out when I feel the sharp bite of a nail. I suck my finger into my mouth and taste blood. It’s just like I thought. The nails aren’t actually nailed into anything, but simply hammered through the door and then distorted, bent parallel to the wood. Still, it won’t open.

I aim a frustrated kick at the door—I need in—and then spring backward as the door rebounds, groaning, unhinging like a vertical mouth. Of course. Not push. Pull.

Something stirs behind me. I whip around as the wind lifts and another wave crashes to the shore, foaming between the slick dark rocks. I scan the beach but see nothing but the looming shapes of ancient boulders, the wild tangle of beach grass, and the faint lights of Beamer’s twinkling in the distance, turning a portion of the ocean silver.

I slip inside the lighthouse, bending down for a sand-slicked rock I can use to keep the door open. This way, at least a little light breaks up the darkness. Besides, Nick will need in.

If she manages to find me.

Inside, the air smells like stale beer and cigarette smoke. I take a step forward, groping for a light switch, and something—a bottle?—rolls away. I collide with a standing lamp and barely catch it before it crashes to the floor. The lamp, which is cabled to a generator, barely lights up a coiled staircase leading to the lighthouse’s upper levels. The room is bare except for a few empty beer cans and bottles, stubbed-out cigarettes, and, weirdly, a man’s flattened shoe. Dozens of footprints crisscross the room, disturbing the heavy layer of sawdust and plaster. Ants swarm a crushed McDonald’s bag in the corner.