Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
Amos
June 2025
T hree days after Daniel’s surprise visit, Amos got up the nerve to invite Nina out to the White Oak Lodge. Over the phone, Nina sounded tentative, as though going back to the property was just as frightening as chasing a ghost.
“Gosh, Amos. I don’t know. I can hardly think straight.”
In the background of the call, Amos could hear Nina’s children giggling, moving around her, asking for ice cream. He could picture them on the boardwalk—a sunny place where he’d once eaten ice cream with his mother.
“I keep wondering if I should just let all this go,” Nina offered.
There was a lightness in Nina’s voice that Amos hoped meant Daniel was off the island. But there was a curiosity, too—proof that, like Amos, Nina kept herself awake at night, stewing over questions that involved Jack Whitmore, Seth Green, Ralph, the White Oak Lodge, and that mysterious letter from Benjamin to Francesca. It was all so long ago. But why did Amos have the feeling they could go back in time and fix it?
Amos was finishing up a job at one of Nancy’s rental cabins, sitting outside in the sun, watching tourists stroll down the beach and push one another into the waves. He could smell the fresh paint and his own sweat.
“But maybe,” Nina offered, “maybe I want the kids to see where I grew up.”
Amos felt a beautiful and genuine smile stretch across his face. “I think they’d like to see it.”
That Saturday, Amos didn’t have work. He picked up Nina, Will, and Fiona, checking twice on the kids’ seat belts, and drove them down the road to the White Oak Lodge. They’d considered walking from the cabin but had decided they might want the truck to make a quick exit. Will and Fiona were dead set on more ice cream afterward, and Amos agreed that it didn’t sound half bad.
“What flavor are you going to get?” Will asked, furrowing his brow. He didn’t trust Amos because Amos wasn’t his father.
It was a test.
Amos thought for a long while before saying, “Cookie dough.”
Will’s shoulders relaxed. “It’s a good flavor.”
Fiona also looked as though she approved.
On the other side of the truck, Nina remained unsmiling, her eyes focused on the White Oak Lodge as it grew bigger and bigger in the windshield. When he pulled beyond the gate and parked out front, the four of them gazed at it, this once elegant hotel that had spent summers filled with some of the wealthiest high-society people the East Coast had ever seen. Most of the hotel side had been burned to the foundation, and tarps covered the walls, but a great deal of the other side looked more or less salvageable. As soon as Amos had that thought, he tried to banish it. He had no right to bring the White Oak Lodge back to life. Maybe it was better left destroyed.
“Kids, this is where I grew up,” Nina said reverently.
They got out and walked slowly toward the structure. Will’s and Fiona’s faces echoed the same kind of curiosity their parents had built their careers upon. They held hands for a full minute before remembering they were a little too old for that.
“My father and mother used to sit on that veranda,” Nina explained, stretching her arm to one side to show that at one time the veranda was a lot longer, “and they would entertain guests and play instruments and watch the sunrise and sunset. It was a magical time.”
“Where was your room?” Fiona asked.
Nina led them to the back of the property, where the immaculate sand stretched for miles in either direction. It looked as though a few teenagers had used an area nearby for a bonfire recently; there were black ash and tarred logs. Nina pointed at the second-floor window of busted glass and fading wood. “That’s where my room was. I was sleeping there the night that the fire broke out.”
Fiona took a frightened breath and looked at her mother with renewed respect. Amos knew that burning houses and orphans were popular topics in elementary-level books. Will and Fiona’s mother was like a woman from a storybook. As her children, they were part of that story, too.
Amos needed to talk to Nina desperately. He needed to do it when the kids weren’t listening. But he wasn’t yet sure how to steal her away. So he bided his time, telling stories about the old White Oak Lodge—stories about the whalers, about Nina’s great-great-grandparents, about their beautiful grandmother Francesca from Italy and her world-famous director father. Fiona and Will’s eyes were enormous. Nina watched Amos with similar rapt attention, as though she couldn’t believe all he knew.
When the kids grew bored of the tall tales, they scampered off down the beach, removing their shoes and socks to put their feet in the water. Nina called after them, “Be careful! Don’t get in too far!” Will and Fiona were dutiful kids who paid attention to what their mother said. They screamed and splashed each other and never got further in than their ankles. How different they were to their uncle Jack, Amos thought.
Jack, who made messes wherever he went.
“I need to talk to you,” Amos blurted, surprising himself.
Nina eyed him nervously. “I know. But I don’t know if I want to know. I don’t know if I have it in me.”
Amos tilted his head. He was suddenly unsure what she meant.
Maybe she thought Amos was falling in love with her. Perhaps she wanted to push him back, tell him she was just getting out of a marriage, and she wasn’t sure her heart could take it.
Am I falling in love with her? Amos wondered. But he brushed the question aside.
“It’s about 1998,” Amos said. “It’s about what was going on back then.”
Nina’s eyes glinted with curiosity and fear. “What is it?”
“It’s better if I show you,” Amos said, gesturing toward the kitchen entrance of the old house.
Nina took a breath. “I don’t know. I really don’t know if I can take it.”
“I know,” Amos said. “But it’s important.”
He’d never told anyone before. But it was time to acknowledge the truth.
Maybe it would further his and Nina’s story. Perhaps it would help Nina find out what really happened to Jack.
But Jack has to be dead. Doesn’t he?
Nina gritted her teeth and took a long moment to think. “I don’t want the kids going inside.”
“No. I don’t want that, either.”
“Let me talk to them.”
Nina hurried down the beach to explain what was happening. Amos hung back, crossing his arms, letting them drop, feeling a mix of horror and adrenaline. What if he led her inside and found nothing? What if that dark door and that shadowy drop were only a part of his nightmares? What if he’d imagined the whole thing?
Nina bent down to chat with Will and Fiona, who nodded dutifully and followed her back to Amos. “They agreed to hang out by the entrance of the house and call in every thirty seconds to tell us they’re okay,” Nina said, smiling. She’d created a game out of it, a game to keep Fiona and Will occupied.
They were ten and eight. When Amos was ten, he’d had to fend for himself. But it was a different time, and Nina was a brilliant mother.
They reached the entrance. Will and Fiona sat on the grass and gazed into the shadows, watching as first Amos, then Nina went inside. Once inside the kitchen, where moss clung to the walls, and it looked as though a few animals had made wild nests, where the table and chairs remained right where they’d left them when they’d abandoned the house, Nina took Amos’s hand and breathed all the air from her lungs. Amos squeezed back and led her into the passageway, explaining as he went.
It was better to tell her when he didn’t have to look her in the eye.
“When I was sixteen, I was broke, so broke that I would do anything for cash,” he said. “Your brother knew that and invited me to the lodge to do some labor. Cleaning the stables, fixing things up. I wasn’t so bad with tools even back then. When I was here, I met your uncle Angelo.”
“Tio Angelo,” Nina whispered.
“Right. He was funny. Charming. Different from any man I’d ever met,” Amos said. “He invited me into the house and led me down this very passageway, to a door he said led into ‘the great beyond.’ That’s what he called it. I asked him what he meant, and he said I had to swear never to tell anyone what was going on.”
Nina squeezed Amos’s hand so hard that Amos winced. He was using his phone to light the passageway, flashing it over moss and busted wood and bits of char.
“Amos, I’m not going to like what you’re telling me, am I?” Nina whispered.
Far down the passageway came the sounds of Will and Fiona, saying they were okay. “We’re okay, Mom! We’re okay!”
Nina called back. “We’re okay, too!” Her voice was bright. “I remember cops coming around. I remember my uncle making food for them. Distracting them. Charming them.”
“I imagine he was good at that,” Amos said.
They’d reached the doorway that led to the basement. Amos had only ever been down this one staircase, into this one passageway that led into one dark and dank basement room. It was there that Angelo had kept the big wooden boxes filled with drugs: cocaine, speed, ecstasy, and weed. It was there that Angelo loaded up his chosen dealers—mostly kids like Amos, kids who were strapped for cash and would do anything Angelo asked.
“He paid us handsomely,” Amos explained, his breathing rapid. “He paid us more money than I’d ever seen. It started out so easy. The kids at the high school wanted drugs, and I supplied them with drugs. And then the tourists came, and I kept selling to them. By the end of that first summer, my mother and I were completely out of debt and thinking about moving. By the end of junior year—the summer of 1998—I felt invincible. I think Jack did, too.”
Nina’s voice shook. “You, Jack, and Tio Angelo? Working together? Selling drugs?”
Amos closed his eyes. “Angelo thought it was perfect. There are so many hiding places in this old lodge. So many passageways to confuse the cops. But somehow, they got wind of what was going on. I was questioned numerous times during June of 1998. I was nervous and thinking about skipping town. Jack was really scared. He wouldn’t be seen with me, and Angelo told me to stop coming around the lodge.”
Nina’s eyes were enormous in the darkness.
“I was at that Fourth of July party the night of the fire,” Amos continued. “I was scared out of my mind because I thought for sure I was about to be arrested. When I heard what happened to the lodge, I couldn’t believe it. The cops questioned me twice about it, thinking maybe I had something to do with it, but I had too many alibis who confirmed I was at the party.”
Nina’s lips parted. Amos could feel her rapid heartbeat through her hand.
Suddenly, she called out, “Kids? Are you there?” Her voice echoed.
“We’re here, Mom!” Fiona and Will called back.
Amos took a breath. An enormous pressure had shifted off his chest. But he couldn’t read Nina’s expression, couldn’t understand what she was thinking.
“You’re saying you think Jack and Tio Angelo had something to do with it?” Nina whispered.
“I don’t know that at all,” Amos said. “I’m just saying it was strange timing. And now that we know there are no death records for your father or Jack—and maybe none for your uncle Angelo—it’s all a little fishy.”
“It is fishy,” she whispered. “I don’t know what to make of it.”
Amos and Nina continued to stare at the black doorway. It felt like a portal to the past. But Amos knew it was too dangerous to climb down as it was. They’d need equipment, stabilization. Maybe they’d need to approach it from a completely different angle.
“You think there’s treasure down there?” Nina asked with a soft laugh. “Like Daniel?”
“I don’t know about that,” Amos said. “I’m just saying, with the Whitmores, nothing would surprise me.”
“Nothing should.” Nina wet her lips and continued to stare into the black. “I want to go to Seth Green’s house. I want to keep digging.”
“I want to dig with you,” Amos said. “In a way, 1998 ruined my life. I was too frightened to leave my mother, and too entrenched in drug dealing to worry about college, and after that, I let the rest of my life pass me by. It happened in a flash.” He snapped his fingers.
“We’re going to get our lives back,” Nina assured him, giving his hand a final squeeze.
After that, Fiona and Will called out again, “Mom! We’re still fine!”