Chapter 45
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Oscar’s breath caught in his lungs as the old tape went to static. A lead weight seemed to sit in his stomach, and his thoughts spun like tires with no traction.
Robin and Ms. Montague had found bodies buried here on the island. A fact Montague hadn’t mentioned even once in their conversations about the haunting and the previous investigation. Given that the tape had been hidden here in the house instead of labeled and packed away with the rest…
“They didn’t tell Dr. Lawson, did they?” His throat was so dry the words barely came out, so he grabbed his water bottle from his side and took a gulp.
“I…I don’t think so.” Nigel looked as though he’d been hit in the head with a two-by-four. “Unless that’s why she said to never trust Ms. Montague. If she knew, and was silenced somehow, by money or threats…”
“But why?” Chris stopped the playback and ejected the tape. “Why hide this?”
“What are the odds this is an old native burial ground?” The Lumbee people had lived here for thousands of years, but Oscar didn’t know anything about their burial practices. “Or a mass grave from a shipwreck?”
“Considering its existence has been hidden from us, I’d say fairly slim.” Nigel’s face had gone two shades paler than usual. “We have to…we should see if the bodies are still there. We don’t have shovels, but maybe if we dug around with our hands in the right place…”
“Ethan didn’t want us wandering around the island.” The odd encounter now took on a greater significance. “Or rather, Montague didn’t.”
“I remember.” Nigel rose to his feet. “All right. Let’s take advantage of the daylight and see if we can find the remains. We’ll have to stay out of sight of the trailer, in case Ethan has woken up and is keeping an eye on us.”
“Do you think he knows?” Chris asked. “Or is he just following orders?”
“I have no idea.” A wave of weariness swept over Oscar.
There were zero good reasons to keep something like this secret, especially if the bodies belonged to indigenous people, or even white settlers from a hundred years ago.
“Nigel, will you stay here? Keep an eye out and intercept anyone approaching the tent, other than Tina, of course. Chris, can you come with me and bring the camera?”
While Nigel remained in the tent, Oscar and Chris slipped out and hurried behind the house, and thence to the dunes. In addition to Chris’s shoulder cam, they both wore head cams, and Chris had their photography camera slung around their neck.
Once they were far enough down the dunes so as not to be seen from the trailer, Chris slowed their pace.
“So how do we find the spot? It was too dark to see much in the tape, and the trees have all died, so the line of sight Robin used to navigate won’t be there now.
We could try to find the pond, I guess.”
“Let’s start walking and see where the beach takes us,” Oscar said.
The waves snarled against the beach, racing high enough to almost touch the dunes.
Both sky and sea were iron gray, except for the whitecaps whipped up by the strengthening wind.
Sand stung Oscar’s face, and he held up a hand to shield himself.
“Whatever happens, we need to bail before tonight. The storm is getting way too close for comfort.”
He hated the thought of leaving Robin and Gloria behind, but dying here wouldn’t help anyone. And if Robin kept haunting Montague’s dreams…given what they’d seen on that tape, Oscar felt far less sympathy for the old woman than he had before.
Since the hungry ocean was surging high on the beach, they struggled along the dunes instead. The sand slid under their feet and beach grass whisked their legs. A few spots of rain fell as they walked, shockingly cold despite the thick, humid air.
There was a shallow inlet that might have been the pond, before the dunes shielding it eroded away.
Oscar turned every hundred feet or so, scanning the stripped trunks of the ghost forest for anything that resembled a break with a line of sight to the tower atop The Cottage.
He didn’t find what he was looking for—but in the end, he didn’t need to.
“Oh shit!” Chris yelled, jumping back and almost losing their balance.
Oscar hurried to the crest of the dune they stood on. The sea roared just on the other side, lashed into a frenzy from the oncoming storm.
No shovels would be needed to find the mass grave Robin and Montague—and perhaps the Vanderwalls before them—had uncovered. Climate change had done the work for them, the rising seas shifting the shore farther and farther back, eating into the sliver of land that was the island.
Bones spilled from the eroded dune. Skulls, femurs, ribs by the dozen, all tumbling free of their resting spot and being slowly lost to the encroaching waves.
“That’s…a lot of people,” Chris said in a low voice, as if they might disturb the dead by speaking too loudly.
“Yeah.” Oscar swallowed. “Start filming. I’m going to take a closer look.”
“I’ll come with you.”
Oscar scrambled down the dune; the incoming tide immediately soaked his shoes. Kneeling beside the pile of bones, he gently picked up a skull and turned it over in his hands.
There was a hole in the side, as if its owner had been shot. But there were other marks as well, almost like cuts around the jaw and base of the skull where the neck would have attached.
“I think this body was dismembered,” Oscar said shakily. He turned the skull so Chris could get a good shot of the cut marks.
The next skull was the same, and the next, and the one after that. Dear God, how many were there?
“Oscar?” Chris’s voice trembled as they crouched beside what looked like one of the bones in the forearm—the radius, Oscar thought. “Can you take a look at this and tell me I don’t see what I think I’m seeing?”
Oscar picked up the bone and squinted. More cut marks on the ends, where the joints would have been…but this time, they were accompanied by what looked disturbingly like the imprint of human teeth.
His gorge rose. Definitely not the remains of a shipwreck, or of executed pirates, and the bullet holes ruled out it being the result of some ancient famine.
The hunting scenes in the paintings came back forcefully. Had Gloria actually fallen down the stairs? And if so, had she been fleeing her father when it happened?
Bile rose in his throat, and it was everything he could do to choke it down. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe there had been an undocumented European settlement on the island, and the colonists resorted to cannibalism like at Jamestown.
Chris circled the mass grave, making sure to catch everything with the shoulder camera. “I think there’s jewelry and other things mixed in.”
Sure enough, gold glinted dully beneath the veil of sand. Oscar brushed the sand aside, then pulled free what looked like a locket, its chain lost somewhere in the pile. As he did so, he began to notice other objects he’d missed, too busy staring at the horror of the bones.
An earring, caught in a mass of hair sloughed from one of the skulls. A fountain pen, corroded but still identifiable. Scraps of rotted cloth and lace. The remains of a hair brush, the wooden handle decayed almost to nothing but the bristles intact.
While Chris swapped cameras to take some photos, Oscar wiped sand and residue from the locket. The front bore engraving: X.R.J., 06.17.03, Now with God. Inside the locket nestled a lock of fine hair, like that from a baby.
Given the style of the fountain pen, this was no colonial-era tragedy. 06.17.03 surely meant June 17, 1903. Someone had lost their baby, come to this island a few years later…and been murdered. Then eaten.
And the Pack were the prime suspects.