Chapter Seventeen
Seventeen
Night has fallen and there’s still no sign of Susie.
Or Loretta.
The notion that Lindy Garrett might be the cause of both their absences hangs heavy over New Avalon, as oppressive as the island’s silence and darkness.
All of it makes me so damn anxious that I couldn’t sleep if I wanted to.
Which I don’t. I’m too worried about what might happen to me if I close my eyes.
Instead, I sit up in bed, scribbling down my thoughts by lamplight the same way I imagine Daisy did a hundred years ago.
While she kept a diary, I write a list of names. After all, Lindy isn’t the only potential culprit. There are others, whose names I jot down starting with the least likely.
Pete.
The theory that he did it to hide his grandfather’s crimes a century ago seems even more ridiculous now than it did when I mentioned it earlier. That brings me to someone tied with Pete as so impossible that I feel stupid for even writing her name.
Molly.
Despite the water on the porch and how utterly real she seemed in the moment, it can’t be her. That was just a bad dream or a stress-induced hallucination. She’s not real. She doesn’t exist. She’s gone.
I move on to the next suspect.
Azra.
The moment I finish writing the name, the mysterious scratching begins.
It sounds like I’m continuing to write, using a pencil to scrawl across the cottage floor.
I wait it out, listening, as the scratching continues for another minute or two before going suddenly, eerily silent.
I stare at the name Azra, fearful, as if the mere act of writing it had summoned them.
I am, I realize, starting to seem like Julianne.
Not that I think Azra is roaming the island, taking us one by one the same way they allegedly did the original women of New Avalon.
That’s preposterous. Well, ninety-nine percent of the way.
Which is why Azra is so high on my list. I can’t rule them out completely because no logical explanation for what’s going on has presented itself.
Except for the second-most-likely suspect.
Ronan.
An hour ago, he pulled me aside to say I shouldn’t feel bad about revealing he was the last person to see Susie. “You were trying to do the right thing,” he said. “Just like I should have done and put my foot down when Loretta insisted on all of us coming here.”
“I thought this was your idea.”
“I wanted to do it on set in North Carolina,” Ronan said.
“It would have been the same deal, with all of you living like Daisy and the others, wearing their clothes, cooking the same way they did. To me, that was the important part. But when Loretta found out we could do it in the actual place where it all happened, she wouldn’t take no for an answer.
She was determined to come here, cost be damned. Now Susie is missing.”
He looked at me then, his gaze searching.
“You believe me, right?” he said. “That I had nothing to do with this? Because I didn’t.”
Although Ronan seemed utterly sincere, I can’t entirely rule out the possibility that this continues to be some elaborate attempt at creating a sense of authenticity.
He admitted as much after the obviously faked part of the séance.
And while he claimed to have nothing to do with what happened after, there’s a small chance he was lying.
He is, after all, the self-proclaimed “method director,” known for putting his cast through the same experiences their characters went through.
It’s possible he’s even taken it one step further.
For all I know, there could be hidden cameras placed all over the island, filming everything we do.
A movie about the making of a movie, shot documentary-style, chronicling the real-life reactions of actresses who didn’t know they were being filmed.
A Blair Witch Project for a moviegoing audience who might not even know what that is.
It would certainly explain Loretta’s continued absence.
As the film’s producer, she would have to know about—and approve—this plan.
If that’s the case, then Susie could also be in on it, since she was the one stomping through the woods with a camcorder.
But that’s where the plan falls apart. Susie’s not a good enough actress to pull that off.
She looked genuinely terrified in that video.
If that was fake, then she gave the performance of her life.
So that leaves Lindy Garrett, the prime suspect.
She’s here in Vermont; knows we are, too; and has definitely read Ronan’s script. And unlike everyone else on the list, living or dead, she has a motive.
“You said Lindy was angry about being fired, right?” Heather said as we spent the afternoon nervously sprawled across the front porch of the main house. “What if she’s taking that anger out on us?”
“I suppose that could be the case,” Ronan said, slumped in a chair brought out from the parlor.
“Then what’s stopping her from continuing to do it?”
Ronan’s answer—“Nothing”—did little to ease our anxiety.
“Is Lindy dangerous?” Violet said as she sat on the porch floor, her back against the siding, the exhausted opposite of prim and proper Mrs. Semple.
“I wouldn’t say that. But I got the sense that she might be…unstable.”
“Is that why she was fired?” Julianne asked.
“Loretta told me she refused to spend the week on New Avalon,” I said. “Apparently, this place scared her enough to quit the movie. Loretta told me she had no choice but to let her go.”
“That’s not entirely the truth,” Violet said, still on the floor. “Yes, Lindy refused to come here, but Loretta was willing to overlook that. I wasn’t. It was entirely disrespectful to the rest of the cast. On this movie, no one gets special treatment. That’s simply the way it must be.”
She paused a moment, picking dirt from her skirt.
“Then there was the fact that Loretta had shown me Lindy’s audition—and I was unimpressed.
I was concerned she wasn’t the best acting partner.
You know how important chemistry is. There needs to be a spark.
So we met for drinks and, well, there was nothing.
Just awkward, stilted conversation. And I knew that, in order for this film to truly work, someone else needed to play Daisy. ”
So that’s why Violet showed up at my cottage with a thermos of martinis. It was a test to see if we clicked. I guess I passed, because I’m here and Lindy isn’t.
Unless she is.
Alone in the dim silence of my cottage, I can’t help but think the firing made Lindy snap, her anger overriding any fear she might have of this place.
It’s entirely, scarily possible that she intercepted Loretta on the mainland before coming here and snatching Susie.
I picture both of them bound and gagged in some dank cellar.
Even worse, I picture Lindy right now huddled in the shadowy woods, planning to act out the next beat in Ronan’s screenplay: Jonquil’s disappearance.
That Heather’s character is the second to vanish makes it strange that she decided not to sleep in the main house when Violet suggested it after a dinner that none of us had any appetite for.
“There’s safety in numbers,” she said.
“It’s true,” Ronan agreed. “Lindy is less likely to get to us if we’re all together with the doors and windows locked.”
“That’s assuming it is Lindy behind this,” Heather said. “For all I know, it’s still one of you. I’ll take my chances on my own.”
Only Julianne ended up going to the main house, moving into a room on the second floor.
I chose to sleep in my cottage with the door locked and a chair tilted against the knob for good measure.
A move I regret, especially now that my exhaustion appears unconquerable, no matter how many times I pace the cottage, slap my cheeks, and go to the washroom to splash rusty-smelling water onto my face.
Eventually I end up back in bed, splayed atop the covers, drifting off to sleep.
When I wake, it’s with a startled yelp as a familiar sound echoes through the cottage.
Thwump.
I sit up, look around. The lamp extinguished itself as I slept, leaving the cottage oppressively dark. I peer through the murk, seeing nothing.
Yet I’m not alone. I can feel the presence of someone else as clearly as I heard the thwump.
My gaze settles on the window opposite the bed, and I suck in a rattling breath.
Someone is there.
Just outside.
At first, I think it might be Lindy, which makes no sense yet all the sense in the world.
If she did something to Susie, then it’s logical to assume she’ll try again with the rest of us.
Now she’s roaming the village atop the island, peering into cottages, trying to figure out who’s where and in what order they vanish from Ronan’s script.
But when the figure at the window doesn’t move, I realize with nerve-jangling fear who it really is.
Molly.
Standing.
Staring.
Dripping.
I shrink against the headboard, trying to make myself as small as possible.
As small as my five-year-old self. Any notion that this might be a nightmare or hallucination or my imagination is countered by the fact that I am awake.
Wide awake and cowering and watching my dead sister watch me as a pair of questions screams through my skull.
What does she want? Why is she here?
I’d ask her if I could talk, which I can’t. Terror has taken hold of my throat, strangling all sound. All I can do is clench my eyes shut and think the words I’d whispered as a little girl.
You’re not real.
Because of course she’s not.
You don’t exist.
Because of course she doesn’t.
Please be gone.
Because of course she’ll go.
Yet when I cover my face with my hands and peek between my fingers, Molly is still there, still staring, still dripping.
Somehow I find enough voice to whisper the words.
“You’re not real. You don’t exist. Please be gone.”
That does the trick. After closing my eyes and opening them again, I see nothing at the window.
Molly is gone.
Unlike in the first episode of this unwanted reboot, I’m now absolutely certain she was there. The only way to truly know, I realize, is to check where she stood on the porch. I assume that, like after her visit yesterday, it will be wet.
I don’t get the chance to find out.
Because when I step onto the porch after several minutes of nervous stalling, I notice that, on the other side of the green, the door to Susie’s cottage is ajar.
That’s alarming enough on its own, since it’s clear Susie hasn’t magically returned.
If she had, she’d surely announce it to all of us, basking in the attention as she regaled us about spending a day lost in the woods.
Even if she did decide to just slip back into her cottage, unnoticed, surely she’d light a lamp or candle.
Instead, her cottage windows remain dark.
As I peer at them from my porch, something passes by the glass. A shadow moving through shadow.
Someone is inside Susie’s cottage.
I mentally run through the suspect list that currently sits on my bed, trying to think of which of them it could be. Only one seems plausible.
Lindy Garrett has returned.