“We could knock the walls down,” Reyva suggested.
She liked that idea.
With Reyva directing them, Claire and Mariana shoved at the charred walls. It didn’t take much before it collapsed in a heap, further burying the trapdoor and the rocks.
When they finished, they retreated beneath the charred tree on the lawn and surveyed their handiwork. “It’ll do,” Reyva said.
“It has to,” Claire said.
“Now can we leave?” Mariana asked. “Unless you wanted to stay. Build a summer home. I’m sure this is a lovely place—you know, when it’s not inhabited by evil.”
They returned to the dock.
Claire walked out on the dock to check the net, while Mariana and Reyva started a fire.
“We’ll make it huge,” Mariana said. “A signal fire, like Claire wanted in the beginning. Someone’s guaranteed to see it, sooner or later, right?”
Peering into the water, Claire saw a shadow wriggle in the net. “I think we have a fish!” You couldn’t call it beginner’s luck anymore. She didn’t feel like a beginner. In fact, she felt as if she’d aged ten years since they’d arrived on the island.
At least ten, she thought.Maybe a hundred.She wouldn’t go as far as to say she felt like a different person....I don’t want to be a different person.
And the thought stunned her so much that for an instant she didn’t breathe.
She didn’t want to be different.
She turned that idea over in her head, like it was a shiny jewel. Less hungry would have been good. Less bruised. But not different.
Breaking through her thoughts, Mariana cheered, “Yes! Fish!”
With Mariana’s help, Claire pulled the net in. The fish flopped on the net, and she stared at it for a moment as it flailed. Murmuring an apology to the fish, she picked up one of the rocks that held the net and hit the fish on the head. It quit moving.
Before she could talk herself out of doing it, she pulled out her Swiss Army knife and cleaned the fish: a slice up its belly, then gill to gill. “Ew, ew, ew,” she said as she pulled out the guts. She sliced the fillets from the spine.
And then she stared at all of it and wondered how she’d just done that. The Claire from a few days ago never would have been able to. She supposed it was nice that all those survival shows her parents watched had come in handy—they must have sunk in. She’d known to be careful to not pierce the intestines, and the result sort of looked like what you’d buy in a fish market.
By the time she’d cleaned everything up and gotten the net back in the water, Mariana and Reyva had the fire going. They set water to boil, slid the fish fillets onto sticks, and held them over the fire.
“We can’t tell anyone about the cave,” Claire said. For one thing, no one would believe them. For another, it would only make it more likely that someone would decide to dig it up.
“So what do we say?”
“I was thinking we go with what we thought originally: the house was burned down in an insurance scam. When the man with the gun’s girlfriend discovered the truth, he shot her and then fled. He then shot himself out of guilt.” Except for the insurance scam, which would obviously be conjecture anyway, it was the truth.
“So we lie?” Mariana said. “Like my father did to his company. Like all our parents did when they talked up this place. You want us to lie to everyone?”
“Not to each other,” Reyva said.
Claire looked at both of them and managed a smile. “Never that.”
They built the fire up as high as they could, until the flames licked the sky. Lying on the rocks, they listened to it crackle and watched the fire writhe and dance. But as high as they built it, it was still another day before they heard the hum of a boat motor across the lake.
Mariana jumped up and down, waving.
Reyva shouted, “Over here! Help!”
Claire joined in, both jumping and shouting, “Help! Help! Help!”
After what felt like an unbearably long time but in reality was less than thirty minutes, the boat angled in to bump against the dock, and a woman in a park ranger uniform—khaki shirt, olive pants, and a National Park Service hat—jumped out and tied onto a mooring. All three of them ran onto the dock.
