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There’s a bobbing float on the end, even slimier than the rope. The float has a screw-off top that Eve isn’t quite strong enough to manage. It’s all I can do to budge the top. It doesn’t want to open up. But at last it gives and inside there’s a key.
Eve tries it. It works. She pushes the door inward and Aislin and I step in after her, batting aside cobwebs.
Eve finds a switch. A single lightbulb high overhead barely touches the shadows. We’re in a big, open space, but not an empty space. Huge shapes rear up over us like creatures frozen in time.
The lightbulb pops and goes out. We all jump.
Eve takes out her phone and uses the light from it to locate a long table. It’s a workbench, really, just some plywood nailed together. She rummages in a drawer and pulls out a package, ripping it open with her teeth. I hear a muted crack.
It’s a glow stick. Blue light. A second glows green.
The light isn’t much better, but my eyes adjust and I see that shapes scattered through the room are abstract statues of some kind. There are forms from nature—trees, I think, flowers, even clouds—but most of the sculptures resemble animals. Next to me, rendered in smooth, white stone, is the suggestion of a ten-foot-tall bear. Near Eve I can make out a tiger in mid-leap—or maybe it’s a lion. No, it definitely feels like a tiger to me.
There must be seven or eight of these strange animal shapes. None of them look precisely like anything, but they all manage to tell you what they might be, could be.
“I haven’t been here in a long time. Not since he died,” Eve says. She sits on the floor, browsing through a stack of canvases leaning against a wall like tumbled dominoes.
I’m about to ask who she means, but it’s obvious Aislin knows. She puts her hand on Eve’s arm and says, “I wish I’d known your dad.”
“Your dad was a sculptor?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Eve says, and even that single word comes out shaky with emotion. “He did some painting and drawing, too. But mostly he sculpted.”
I find the package of glow sticks. I snap one—it’s blue, too—and use it to explore the room. There is something moving about this place. Something sacred, somehow.
“Won’t your mother know you’ll come here?” I call back to Eve from behind something that must be a hawk or an eagle. It’s hanging from the rafters by chains, and it doesn’t look happy about being chained.
“My mom doesn’t remember he was ever alive,” Eve says.
“How did he die?”
“Car accident in Tiburon. I was eleven.”
My heart pulls a lurch. “Where?”
Tiburon.
Eve’s seventeen.
I do the math.
She shrugs: It’s an unimportant detail. “Paradise Road, the back road to Tiburon. It’s a twisty, two-lane … well, you know that.”
Yes. I know.
Pieces fall into place. Pieces I never suspected.
My history with Eve goes much further and deeper than I know.
So that’s why Terra Spiker took me in: guilt.
Her husband killed my parents.
Six years ago on a foggy night, someone tried to pass my parents’ car. The driver must have seen oncoming traffic, because he suddenly swerved back and hit my parents, knocking their car over the side of the embankment.
The two cars crashed down through trees and rock, spraying dirt in every direction, the passengers smashing again and again against the dashboards and the steering wheels and roofs until they were all dead.
At least, that’s how I see it sometimes, in my nightmares.
