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And sure enough, I tried to pick out voices, and there they were, just under the drone of the outboard motor. A bunch of ‘em.
Out in the mist, the boat slipped by, with the guy at the tiller still as a statue. There was no bob or slew like you’d expect from a watercraft. It moved like it was being towed along by a string.
I shuddered.
Once the boat had passed, Shane gave my arm a jostle and whispered, “Let’s go see.”
If there were people nearby, it stood to reason they’d gotten themselves to the river somehow. And if someone didn’t offer us a ride, well…I wasn’t about to take “no” for an answer.
We crunched along the riverbank, less careful of the noise now as the babble of distant voices grew louder. The fog was thicker than my old man’s belt, but eventually we muddled through close enough to see what was going on. The black boat was tied on a mooring with a handful of people sitting inside, and another dozen forming a loose line on the shore. They were all different. Black, white, brown. Old, young. Up-and-coming, or down on their luck. The only thing they had in common was that their clothes were all torn and singed.
“What’s with those getups?” I wondered.
Shane squinted through the drifting fog. “Maybe they’re all extras in some kind of movie.”
I might have bought it…if someone had been filming them. But no one was. Not even on their iPhone. In fact, there was no bus, no carpool, no nothing that could’ve brought those people here all at once. Just a guy at the front of the line in a subway conductor’s getup. And one by one, as the singed, torn people ponied up to the black boat, the conductor would hand them each a ticket…which they’d hand off to the boatman not a second later.
“How are they all fitting on that boat?” Shane asked—not like he expected me to enlighten him. Because the only logical answer was,They can’t.
But obviously, somehow, they damn well could—and as they piled in, the boat didn’t so much as dip. Its prow was lost to the fog, so I couldn’t see exactly how the passengers all crammed themselves on. Soon, though, the last person had hopped in—the conductor—and the boatman unhitched from the mooring, gave his outboard motor a crank, and coasted off into the haze.
The atmosphere went quiet, totally still, and eventually Shane said, “We could have just got in that line.”
“But we didn’t.”
He sighed. “No. We didn’t.”
He sounded so sad—so lost—that it stirred up some deeply buried desire in me to make things right. “And why would we? We got no clue where we’d end up.”
Shane’s hand slipped from my arm, and as it did, I realized just how long it had been there. “We’d end up somewhere. Which is a lot more than I can say for the place we’re in right now.”
Things can always get worse. But before I could impart that hard-earned wisdom, I saw the boat had left something behind: a dark shape jutting out from the sandy silt at the river’s edge. “Hold on—what’s that?”
Shane squinted. “Is it…a bottle?”
Together, we crunched across the gravelly stretch between the weeds and the riverbank. It took us just as long as you’d expect to reach it, too, with none of that weird distortion. When things seem too easy, it’s usually a trap. But before I could warn Shane to cool his jets, he was on his knees in the mud.
But when he pried it out of the ground, I saw it wasn’t some pipe bomb or molotov cocktail. Just a fancy cut glass bottle with a stopper on top. The type of thing you’d find at an old lady’s estate sale.
“I know this is gonna sound crazy,” Shane said, “but this belonged to my mother.”
“Belonged—past tense?”
Shane huffed out a humorless laugh. “My sister—Heather—well, the two of us used to steal ’em from the china cabinet to play potions master. She always got to be Professor Snape. Cruets, that’s what they’re called. Oil and vinegar. For all those fancy dinner parties my family never had. Anyway, I think Heather was the one who filled it with Pepsi and mayonnaise, yelledExplodicon,and hurled it at the wall…though she always claimed it was me.”
If I’d ever pulled a stunt like that as a kid, I wouldn’t have been able to sit for a week.
“The other one went right in the trash. Mom said you can’t have just one. It was useless.” Shane’s voice went soft. “Just like us.”
Huh. Maybe Shane’s folks weren’t so different from mine after all.
He pulled at the stopper a few times, but his hand was slippery with mud. Third time was the charm, and the bottle opened with a dusty sigh that made us both flinch.
“I wouldn’t touch that—” I said, but he was already tipping the contents out into his hand.
A whiff of vinegar, and a tightly rolled piece of paper.
“A message in a bottle?” Shane said. “Heather would’ve gotten a real kick out of this.”
