“You were kind of concerned with the not-starving part of it,” Mariana said. “We all were. Don’t blame yourself. As Reyva said, none of us noticed.”
“But you trusted me!” Claire said. She heard her voice break, and she swallowed hard. It meant so much that they trusted her and believed in her, and now... It felt like a knife jabbed into her rib cage. She didn’t know whether to scream or cry. “Anticipate the worst, that’s what I always do, yet somehow I failed to even consider that we were on an island!”
“On the plus side,” Mariana said, “we’re not lost. And we’re reunited with our stuff.” Setting aside the water jar, she unzipped her suitcase and marveled at the clean clothes.
“Yay,” Claire said, slumping over the railing of the dock and glaring into the water. She noted that the tennis net was still submerged. And it didn’t have any fish. So much for their beginner’s luck. “We’re back where we started, but worse off. We’re hungrier. Reyva’s injured. And we still have no idea how to get home. Can’t follow the shoreline. Can’t swim to shore, not with Reyva’s arm. And there’s no boat.”
It was ten times worse than before, because all that beautiful, light, fluffy hope she’d been feeling had vanished like water vapor into the air. She should have never let herself feel it.
“Come drink some water,” Mariana said. “You’ll feel better.”
Unlikely, she thought, but she trudged off the dock to join Reyva and Mariana by the site of their first fire. She picked up a jar, sniffed it, then drank. It was lukewarm from the sun and tasted faintly swampy.
As she swallowed, she noticed that not everything was where they’d left it. The site of their fire was now more of a firepit, lined with a circle of rocks. A stack of firewood was tucked beside one of the boulders. Just beyond the tree line, she saw branches lying at an angle—a rudimentary shelter.
She lowered the jar from her lips.
“Put it all back,” Claire said. “Leave everything where it was.”
Mariana looked up from her suitcase. “Sorry?”
“This is Jack’s camp. We have to erase any trace that we’ve been here.” Claire tucked the jars back where they’d found them. Grabbing a branch from the edge of the forest, she swept at their footsteps, erasing them as best she could from around the camp.
Mariana scanned the area. “He’s not here now. I say we use what we can—”
Reyva plunged into the forest and checked his makeshift shelter. “No backpack. He must have the satellite phone with him.”
Of course he did. It would be his most important possession, his way out whenever he chose to use it. “Plan A, hiking to the boathouse, obviously won’t work, so how do you feel about plan B?”
“What’s plan B again?” Mariana asked.
“Get the phone from Jack,” Claire said. “Call for help.”
“No right hook,” Reyva reminded her.
Mariana picked up a branch from the woodpile and grinned ferally at both of them. “I don’t need a right hook to hit him with this.”
“We hide, wait for him to come back, and then surprise him,”Claire said. “If we catch him off guard—Or better still, we wait until he’s asleep and then grab his bag. If we’re careful enough, he might never even know we’re here.”
“Love it,” Mariana said.
They devoted themselves to eradicating any hint of their presence, and then they slipped into the woods near his shelter. In this area, there were plenty of boulders littering the forest, so they had their pick of hiding spots. Crouching down, they kept an eye on his camp, the dock, and the trail to the Lake House.
And they waited.
They didn’t have to wait long.
Claire heard the crunch of leaves from the trail and put her finger to her lips. She breathed shallowly and held as still as possible as she peered around the rock and through the underbrush.
A few seconds later, she saw him: Jack, still in his orange T-shirt, his pack slung over his shoulder. He was carrying a dead rabbit, but aside from that macabre detail, he looked as ordinary and innocent as he had the day he’d brought them here.
He got in over his head, she thought.
What his father had done—whoever he owned money to—whatever kind of mess he’d gotten involved in—it wasn’t Jack’s fault. She didn’tknowthat, of course, but it felt true.
He was just trying to deal with the consequences.
And doing it badly, she thought.Very badly.
