Chapter Thirty-Four
Now
The door to Rig’s office was open. A single lamp spilled warm light across the desk, and it beckoned me in. I didn’t really have a plan. I was following my instincts.
Inside, the room wasn’t so much messy as it was cluttered. There were bookshelves lining each wall, some far more organized than others.
I came around to his desk and froze. Because sitting there, plain as day, was my mother’s Bible.
My pulse thrummed as I picked it up. I’d asked Rig about this last night. He told me he’d look around, that it might have wound up in the office. I hadn’t followed up with him.
My hand found the pendant around my neck, the only thing of hers I’d managed to unearth. The necklace that had made all the color drain from his face.
I pushed away the dangerous thoughts, the ones that told me that he’d lied to me more than once. That he’d kept me away from her things on purpose.
Inside the cover was my mother’s name, written in the small, blocky handwriting that I’d inherited. Anita Jane Olsen.
My mom had kept an almost superstitious eye on it, always keeping it in the same spot next to her bed. I flipped through it now, looking for something, though I wasn’t sure what.
All I knew was that Rig had claimed he didn’t know where it was. But it was here—not only in his home, but in his office.
Closing my eyes, I made myself think back on what Margo and I had discovered so far.
My mom and Steph’s mom had been best friends for two years. Winona came at the start of the season, and two summers later, she was gone.
And two decades later, Steph had come here to figure out what happened to her. Whatever she’d found had gotten her killed.
I flipped through the Bible, desperate for answers, but it seemed like there was nothing else. Just a few underlined verses and dog-eared pages. Until I got to the very end.
My heart stuttered in my chest. There was a photo of my mother and Winona. In it, Winona wore a faded green Dread’s Cove sweatshirt—exactly like the one she wore in the photo Margo and I had found in Black Bass. Her hair even looked the same, like it had been snapped the same day.
And on the back inside cover, there was a crude drawing of lines and shapes, which would be utterly meaningless if you didn’t recognize them.
It was the same drawing that Margo and I had found scrawled on the back of the photo of Steph’s family. And now, of course, I understood. So simple and obvious. It wasn’t a symbol at all.
It was a map.
There was nothing to decode. These were simply directions, to an unknown destination.
I thought back on that awful night, when Steph had convinced me to break into my mother’s cabin and sneak into her wine cellar.
Those terrible, dark moments where I thought she’d left me alone forever.
Wondering if all along she’d been playing some sort of game that I’d been too blind to see, just like Chelsea had said.
I was seeing that night in a much different way now.
Steph asking me to go to the Barn with her, then deciding we had to get a bottle of wine—that we had to break into my mom’s place when she wouldn’t be there.
Not stopping me when I’d offered to retrieve the bottle.
While I’d been banging on the cellar door, calling out for help, she must have been upstairs in my mother’s bedroom—not harmlessly exploring my room, like she’d claimed.
No, she must have gone through her closet, her drawers.
Invaded her privacy while she was miles away.
She would have found this Bible, on my mother’s bedside table, where she always kept it, unless she was going on her morning jog through the woods.
I could see it now, so vividly: Steph opening it, finding the map, but in the moment not understanding what it meant.
Seeing the photos—one of her own family—and taking it, because she couldn’t help herself.
Copying the strange symbol down on the back of the picture, because that’s all she had handy, and she had to move fast before I really started screaming.
Then putting the photo in her pocket, a keepsake of the mother and the secret life she couldn’t remember.
I thought back on what Margo had told me about the night of the fire. How frantic Steph had been. That she’d seemed crazed, barely able to string a sentence together—how she’d said, We’re so close. I finally figured it out.
And right before that, when I’d talked to her by the beach. How distraught she was. At that time, I’d thought she’d just been drunk and belligerent. Talking nonsense, angry at the world for reasons I didn’t understand.
But that wasn’t right, was it? She hadn’t been angry at the world. She’d been angry at my mom—she’d told me as much. Something she said that night crashed through my brain: I asked her a question, and she lied.
It was starting to make sense. She must have meant that she’d asked my mom about Winona Hayes. And just like Rig had lied to me, my mom had lied to Steph.
When she told me she found proof…this is what she’d meant. She’d found this very Bible, the photos linking my mother and hers.
And then her eyes had lit up when I’d said the word map.
That was when it clicked for her. That was when I’d left her alone, and she’d gone sprinting after the truth. Margo had noticed while my back had been turned, and she’d gone after her.
I ran a finger over the lines of the map, visualizing all of Dread’s Cove and the surrounding forest, and a wave of understanding washed over me. The square in the center of the drawing was the Barn.
That was the central element here, what my mother had written down. And the lines, projecting out, were the two trails bisecting in the forest.
And the small square was—whatever this map was leading to. Whatever secret Steph has been determined to find.
Margo told me that when they got to the Barn, Steph had completely freaked out. It must have been because she couldn’t find her copy of the map. She’d left it back in Black Bass, either by accident or on purpose. Where it had waited between the floorboards, not to be found for years and years.
Margo had been right about me the other day. When she’d said I was always pretending. This would be different. There would be no hiding. I would follow this map wherever it led.
I had to know. I had to know everything.
It was still quiet downstairs; all I could hear was my own heart, thundering wildly in my chest. I was close now. I could feel the truth, beckoning me. Waiting me out.
It seemed like Val was still asleep. For how long, I couldn’t be sure. Clutching the Bible to my chest, I crept back out of the study and into the hallway. The only other room upstairs was the primary bedroom.
The door hinges screamed as I pushed it open, and I froze, waiting to hear a sleep-addled Val’s call of “Rig?” up the stairs. But the quiet seconds stretched on, and, holding my breath, I stepped inside.
The lights were off, but the full moon was bright tonight, the whole room cloaked in an eerie, almost otherworldly glow.
There was a mirror over the dresser that I stopped and looked at myself in. My eyes were sunken, haunted. My cheeks were blotchy from the heat and the chardonnay that had left a saccharine taste in my mouth. I looked scared. I was scared.
Why had Rig lied to me? About Winona, about my mother?
What was he hiding? What had he done?
My hand flew to the chain around my neck. It had turned into a source of comfort these past few days. One day soon, I would find a jewelry store, and I would fix the broken N-I-E—
And that’s when it struck me, like an anvil being dropped on my head. The realization was so strong, so visceral, that I almost staggered back.
N-I-E. The last three letters of my mother’s nickname, yes.
But they were also the last three letters of Stephanie.
The gasp left my mouth before I could stop it. I thought of Rig’s eyes on it last night, when we’d spoken in the mess hall. How I’d thought he was sad, that maybe he’d even been the one to give it to my mother, years and years ago. But what if I’d read him totally wrong?
What if it wasn’t grief I’d seen on his face—but panic? Or guilt?
What if he had killed Stephanie for what she’d discovered? And—no, no, no—what role had my mother played?
Because I’d found this necklace in her room.
I felt dizzy, like I was edging near a full-blown meltdown, and closed my eyes, trying to center myself.
It was an incredible violation to dig through their bedside tables, but that had been where I’d found the necklace.
Some part of my brain found logic in that—maybe I’d find more secrets here.
Maybe I’d find the final piece of this impossible puzzle.
In Val’s table, I found only cherry hand lotion, a deck of cards, and a few matchbooks.
I crossed to the other side of the bed slowly. My mouth was dry, even as I tried to swallow the dread and fear creeping up my esophagus.
My hand was shaking as I eased open the drawer, as I prayed to every deity I could think of that I’d find nothing.
That I was mistaken—that this was all anxiety playing tricks on me.
Because Rig was Rig. He was safe. He was the closest thing to a dad I’d ever had, and I loved him.
My mom was the best person I knew, the most selfless, the most altogether good; she would never have had a hand in something so violent. In a murder.
Not of her best friend’s daughter. And not of her daughter’s new best friend.
I’d almost convinced myself, as I groped around in the darkness. That it was an overreaction, that I was jumping to conclusions. That there was no way my family—who I trusted—was capable of that kind of evil.
But then my hand found something dark and solid, and I drew it to my face to take a closer look.
Just as the front door swung open downstairs, I realized I was holding a gun.