Chapter Twenty-Nine
Twenty-Nine
Violet swears the plan is simple.
I beg to differ.
Nothing about this ruse of theirs so far has been simple.
The scope of it—not to mention its sheer audacity—is breathtaking, and there were a thousand ways in which it all could have fallen apart.
It still might, depending on my performance this evening.
Which wasn’t supposed to be a performance at all.
“We’ll start with pretending to contact Molly,” Violet says as the two of us prepare the parlor for tonight.
We stand at the table, arranging the lettered squares exactly the way they were during the first séance.
“Ask her some questions, apologize for failing her, and then make peace. Since we want Ronan to do the same thing when we contact Elise next, he needs to believe every word. You need to really sell it, Marin. Do you think you can do that?”
I give her a look. “Can I convincingly express guilt and remorse for failing to prevent the drowning death of my sister? Yeah, Violet. I think I can manage it.”
“It’s not that I doubt your abilities,” Violet says as she places the YES and NO squares amid the letters.
“It’s just very important that we get this right.
Everything we did was designed to lead us to tonight.
We hoped the history of the island, plus these new disappearances and us talking about our own hauntings, would muddy reality, guiding us to a situation in which Ronan—”
“And me,” I remind her, just to make it clear I’m still mad about being dragged into all of this.
“Yes, you as well. We didn’t mean any harm. Truly. We just needed—”
“A patsy.”
Violet puckers her lips, as if she can taste the word’s sourness. “Another believer. For the sake of realism. So that Ronan would think the only way out of the situation is to confess what he did to Elise.”
“Which is why you sprayed her perfume in his room,” I say.
“Close,” Violet says, impressed I figured it out.
“It’s actually a sachet. Brad cut open Ronan’s mattress and stuffed it inside.
He really is a genius. Rigged all types of things.
Like those candles.” She points to the sideboard and its quartet of candles in brass holders.
“The candles and candlesticks are hollow. Brad drilled holes into the sideboard beneath them and built a mechanism in the back. One flick of the switch yanks all four wicks down into the candles at the same time, snuffing them out.”
I go to the sideboard and peer behind it, seeing a complex rig of strings and switches. All this to coerce a confession from someone? There had to have been an easier way.
“Why didn’t all of you just confront Ronan?”
“Do you really think he would have admitted it?” Violet says.
“Yeah, if you held him at gunpoint,” I reply, shocking myself for even thinking of it.
Not shocked is Violet. “We considered that,” she says in an offhanded way that makes me assume she’s serious.
“Our concern was that people would think Ronan didn’t really do it.
That we coerced a false confession out of him.
We need him to willingly volunteer the information.
We thought there might be a chance to avoid all of this if Susie got him talking on tape, but that didn’t work. ”
“The camcorder’s here now, I assume.” I look around the room for potential hiding spots. When Violet starts to tell me, I stop her and say, “No. I want to see if I can find it myself.”
I zero in on the mahogany box with the wicker door placed between the candles on the sideboard. When I open it, I see the camcorder hidden inside.
“I swapped out the old battery for the one in Susie’s cottage and tested the angle,” Violet says as she picks up the camcorder and presses play.
An image of the table and a single empty chair appears on the view screen.
Although the image is slightly obstructed, thanks to the wicker grid of the door, it still captures enough to see who’s in the empty chair.
“Ronan has to sit there,” Violet says. “In front of the letter I. Once we coax a confession out of him, we end the séance, call Loretta, and get off this godforsaken island. Then we release the video and let the court of public opinion decide Ronan’s fate.”
Okay, so it’s definitely not simple. But it does seem doable, especially if we avoid some of the theatrics of the previous séance.
“No moving table and falling picture frames tonight, I hope,” I say. “How’d you guys get that to fall on cue anyway?”
“We didn’t,” Violet says. “It just happened.”
I don’t believe her. Honestly, she’s given me no reason to.
“Sure. Just like you didn’t cause those noises in my cottage.”
“What noises?” Violet says, looking at me with genuine confusion. It’s all in the eyes, which dilate ever so slightly with fear.
“A scratching that sounded like it was coming from somewhere within the walls. There were also thumps. Loud ones. They happened all the time.”
“That wasn’t part of the plan,” she says. “If one of us was responsible, they didn’t tell me. I don’t know anything about it.”
I try not to be unnerved by the idea that one of the others has been going off script, so to speak. I was alone in the cottage every time the noises happened.
At least I thought I was.
When I return to the cottage after dinner to get ready for the séance, I search the entire place for signs of Brad’s handiwork. As far as I can tell, there are no hidden mechanisms, no tricks, literally no strings to be found.
Which makes it all the more disturbing when the scratching returns.
It happens as I change from the street clothes I’ve worn all day into my blue dress.
An order from Violet to, in her words, “make the séance feel as real as possible.” Well, I don’t know about the séance, but the scratching noises certainly sound real.
Enough to create an anxious chill at the base of my spine, even though I know it was faked.
Somehow.
By someone.
“Brad?” I say into the empty air of the cottage. “You can stop now. I know everything.”
The scratching stops. A pause of exactly thirty seconds that ends with a…
Thwump!
It’s louder than the previous ones. A real cottage-rattler. So much so that I rush outside and circle the place, expecting to find Brad and Heather out back with a battering ram, readying another strike. But there’s no one else near the cottage, making me wonder how they’re possibly doing it.
Because, I realize, it might never have been Brad or Violet or any of the others.
Something else could be responsible.
I can’t help but think about what Violet said this morning. That Daisy’s full diary doesn’t completely rule out the idea that something else could be lurking on this island. Something supernatural. Something…malevolent.
Even though she said it to salvage her ruse, it might be true.
It’s at least plausible. There’s always been something off about New Avalon.
I’ve felt it ever since I approached the island in Pete’s boat.
A shivery disquiet. I suspect it’s one of the reasons I fell for the others’ grand deception. I’d sensed it in my bones.
I feel it now as I continue to circle the cottage, which makes me consider the prospect that the island is indeed haunted.
And if such a thing is possible, that would mean that Molly’s visits to my window when I was five might really have happened, too.
Yes, I get why my parents blamed a mental imbalance brought on by grief.
But they never experienced what I went through.
They didn’t see Molly at their window, staring, looking for something that I never could grasp.
Now, though, I think I understand what my sister was doing during those late-night visits.
She was watching over me.
Making sure that I was safe—and that I could go on without her.
And if I believe that, then I guess it means I believe all of it. That her visits were real. That she was real.
I know there’s no way to ever prove it, just as I know that most people, including my parents, wouldn’t agree. I really don’t care anymore. I spent twenty years wondering if Molly’s haunting really happened. Now I choose to believe it did. Which, to me, makes it true.
Just like I think it could be true that New Avalon is haunted. Maybe not by a typical ghost or an evil spirit, but by something. An energy, perhaps. Or an ancient force no one can quite identify. A thing that once was here and now lingers.
Night is falling fast by the time I finish circling the cottage, its arrival hastened by storm clouds rolling in from the west. A wall of darkness that slowly but surely erases the stars that have just popped into the sky. I watch them wink out one by one as I head back to the main house.
Inside, all is dark save for a single lamp just beyond the front door.
I grab it, intending to let it guide me to the parlor.
Instead, I end up in the kitchen, with only a vague notion as to why.
Running on instinct, I grab the first sharp object I spot—the ice pick—and bring it with me into the parlor.
There, for reasons that don’t make complete sense to me, I kneel at the sideboard and scrape at it with the ice pick. My etching skills are terrible. More stabbing than carving. But within minutes I’ve created a rudimentary circle surrounding a six-petaled flower.
I stand, drop the ice pick onto the sideboard, and admire my handiwork.
A daisy wheel of my own making.
Just in case.