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  His blue eyes narrowed on me appraisingly. “So. You want to go to Trespass.”

  “I wanted to take a ferry but they said there wasn’t one.”

  Ben Deare’s head bobbed. “That’s right. None of ’em can take you. It ain’t allowed.”

  “But I paid that man,” I argued.

  He shook his head. “He should have known better, the fool. Nope. You can’t go to Trespass.” But his blue eyes gleamed beneath scraggly eyebrows and flicked back and forth over my features. As if memorizing the details of my face, to recall later.

  “You live there, don’t you?” I asked. “Why can’t you take me?”

  When he didn’t answer, I cranked up the volume. “I said, why can’t you—”

  “There ain’t no use in shouting at me!” he hollered. He cast his eyes down, then fixed his cap firmly on his head. “Miss Delia, I’m awful sorry but you can’t go there.”

  “Look,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Mr. Deare. I’m going to get out there and see my grandmother. “As I spoke, a desperate, stupid idea occurred to me, and I added, “I’ll buy my own boat if I have to and sail there.” I was so close; I wasn’t going to let rules or politeness keep me back now. Of course, I had no idea how to sail a boat or how much a boat cost, or even the slightest desire to get into a boat. But he didn’t know that.

  “It’s a free country,” I said, raising my chin. Mrs. Cronus, my eighth-grade civics teacher, would have been proud of my basic grasp of the Constitution. “I can go where I want.”

  “Well, that ain’t exactly true. Nope, not exactly.”

  “Which part?”

  “Ayuh.” The old man peered at me and let out a wheezy chuckle. “But I do like your gumption. Sound just like your mother too. You just don’t know what you’re asking.” He looked out at the water for a long moment, his flinty blue eyes roving back and forth. Trying to judge the weather, maybe, though the sky looked perfectly clear to me.

  “You’ve a right to go and see your people, I suppose,” he said grudgingly. He reached into a sagging pocket. “But it’s not you or me that’ll have to decide. Here.”

  His gnarled hand placed what looked like five white sticks into my palm.

  “Throw the knuckles.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “When an important decision’s to be made, I strew them fingers,” he said with a solemn nod.

  Fingers? With horror I realized what I thought were sticks were actually pieces of bone with irregular, yellowed surfaces and knobby ends.

  “Gah!” My hand shook and the bones dropped to the ground, clattering and bouncing before coming to a stop. The old man crouched to inspect them.

  After a second he slapped a knee. “Clear enough,” he said. He scooped them up and returned them to a pocket, then straightened. Or as near to straight as he was able. “I’ll take you to Trespass. And you can call me Ben.”

  With that he whirled off and strode down the dock, leaving me to grab my belongings and scramble after him. I caught words here and there as he muttered to himself:

  “Miss Delia McGovern, harrumph. Spittin’ image. Buy a boat. Harrumph … Devil to pay … the hands.”

  I couldn’t make any sense of it. And the resemblance to one of Popeye’s monologues was kind of scary.

  We passed boat after boat tied to the dock: from fishing boats stacked with lobster traps to tall-masted sailboats whose glossy cabins were studded with electronic equipment and antennas. At the very end of the dock, the old man stopped. I stared down a rusty metal incline and felt my stomach contract. A dilapidated wooden sailboat floated below. Barely. Rope, plastic buckets and fishing poles littered the floor of the boat. Peeling paint nearly obscured the name on the side: Belores. A frayed piece of rope was fastened to a barnacle-encrusted timber of the dock. The boat looked like a mangy dog left on the curb, tugging at its leash.

  “We’re going in that?” I said, staring. “Isn’t it kind of … small?” He would probably take it as an insult if I used some of the other words that came immediately to mind: filthy, leaky, death trap, etc.

  “Got to be small to get through the Hands,” replied Ben. He’d already hopped nimbly into the boat. When I didn’t nimbly follow, he said, “The reef around Trespass. We call it the Hundred Hands.” He squinted up. “You ain’t one of them queasy types, are you?”

  “No. No, of course not. This is great.”

  I inched down the wobbling ramp, the small suitcase bumping behind me, stepped in, teetered for a second and plopped down heavily. The orange life vest Ben handed me smelled musty, but I slipped it on and tied each of the three straps tight.

  “Don’t you need one?” I asked.

  “Nah. I just keep that one in case the Coast Guard wants to make a stink about their rules. Couldn’t drown if I wanted to.”

  I must have given him an odd look. “I was born with a caul,” he explained as he fired a battered black motor to life. “A birth membrane over my head. It’s a good omen for a sailor—I’ll never die in the sea.”

  The smell of gasoline fumes and salt air filled my nose, and a puddle of water sloshed over my feet as we chugged out of the harbor. I held myself rigidly in the middle of the boat’s hard bench seat. I clutched my backpack on my lap with one hand and held tightly to the side with the other. The inside of the wooden rail had been scratched and carved with pairs of letters.

  “What are all the letters for?” I asked.

  The old man gave me a wry smile. “The initials of all my old sailing mates from years past. Just an old man’s fancy.”

  This was crazy. I’d just hopped into a boat that looked about as seaworthy as a bobbing coffin. With a complete stranger who carried old finger bones in his pocket and doodled on his boat.

  But for some reason I wasn’t afraid of Ben Deare. There was something comforting about the odd little man. He moved like a little brown spider, handling the ropes and wheels and cranks of the boat as if they were extensions of his own limbs. “What did you see in those bones, anyway?” I asked him.

  “Portents. Things in your future.”

  “What things?”

  He looked me in the eye from beneath his scraggly brows. “A monster,” he said solemnly.

  He was teasing me. Or maybe this was some kind of weird fortune-telling act he performed for tourists. “Really?” I said with a smile. “Only one?”

  He frowned, seeming to consider the question carefully. “No,” he answered at last.

  I’d had about enough of this. “Okay, right. How long will it take to get there?” I asked in a small, tight voice.

  “Never know,” he answered with a shrug. My face must have shown my confusion, because he added, “I mean … maybe an hour.” He reached up and resettled his cap. “Maybe less if the winds favor us.”

  As I stared down at the water racing alongside the boat, an hour seemed like a long time. The churning noise of the motor sounded like a noisy washing machine, and the air whipped my curly hair every which way. I closed my eyes and tried to get used to the swaying, dipping movement. I was the queasy type. Definitely.

  Shouldn’t have been a surprise, I guess. I’d never been out in a boat before.

  “Open your eyes, miss,” said Ben as he pulled a rope taut. “Look where you’re going. It’ll pass.”

  The old man shut off the motor. Now the only sounds were the slap of wind against the huge canvas sails overhead and the splash of water. The air had changed; it had turned cooler and had lost the fishy smell of the harbor—the scent was clean and fresh.

  I tried to follow Ben’s advice and kept my eyes trained on the edge of water that blended with blue sky ahead. After a while my stomach felt better.

  “How many people live on Trespass?” I asked.

  “Oh, ’bout twelve hundred folks live there. Give or take,” he answered.

  I spoke up to ask Ben a few more questions, but the old man didn’t seem to hear me. Or maybe he just wasn’t interested in talking; he was completely fo
cused on the task of sailing, his eyes scanning the horizon. That was fine. The less talk, the fewer questions he could ask me. As the Belores sailed I felt myself relax. Fatigue crept up and made my head droop, cushioned by the bulky life preserver.

  “Almost there. May get a bit rough here.” Ben’s voice jolted me awake.

  I opened my eyes and let out a gasp of surprise.

  White fog surrounded us.

  “What’s happening? Are we lost?”

  “Pshaw. Lost,” answered Ben with derision. He leaned forward and his grizzled features popped into view. “There’s always a bit of fog here.”

  A bit of fog? Dense mist swirled around my face in thick swaths, cool and wet as fingers stroking my cheek. I shivered.

  Ben Deare reached down and rapped his knuckles against the bottom of the boat.

  As soon as he did this, the fog parted. It was as if a giant hand had reached down and pulled aside a white curtain. The Belores floated into blue skies and sunlight.

  Blinking against the glare of sun, I held a hand up to shade my eyes and gulped in a breath. Ahead loomed the shape of an island. Gray rock topped with a fringe of evergreen. The silhouette was a craggy face emerging from the water.

  The crashing noise of surf became louder as water lapped up the side of the small boat. The Belores lurched up and over waves. On impulse I leaned over the side and looked down at the water’s rippling surface. Tentatively I dipped my hand in. The cold was a shock against my skin, but it felt good. Like icy silk, rippling through my fingers.

  Beneath the water something cold and slick touched me.

  It grabbed my hand.

  I screamed and yanked back as a long black form streaked beneath the surface. The boat rocked hard and I toppled, hitting my shoulder against the opposite side.

  “Wh-what was that?” I screeched, scrambling to right myself.

  “Keep your hands out of the water,” Ben called, his voice gruff.

  He was leaning over the front. I heard him mutter indistinct words and he tossed a handful of what looked like dried leaves overboard that scattered and sank beneath the surface.

  “There’s something under the boat! Something grabbed me!”

  Ben didn’t turn, only shook his head. “Just seaweed, miss. We’re past the reef now. Just got your hand tangled in it as we passed over. Best to just sit still, here in the middle.”

  “Right. No problem,” I whispered, wiping my cold, wet hand on my jeans. I was too shaken to take my eyes from the water. I wanted out of this boat. Out of this ocean. I was totally ready to admit this had been a mistake, probably my biggest to date. But it was too late to turn back now; we were approaching Trespass Island.

  CHAPTER 2

  Everyone has secrets.

  My whole life my mother had never told me where she was born, or anything about my family. It was as if we had emerged together, she and I, from some shadowy past, without a connection to anything. The only things I knew were that she’d left home at sixteen when she was pregnant with me and that afterward she and my grandmother had never spoken again. She’d told me my grandmother was a reclusive, “eccentric” woman who wanted nothing to do with us. And neither did my father. In fact, I only knew my grandmother’s name because it was the one I’d been given for my middle name; I was Delia Marianne McGovern.

  It may seem strange, but I never really resented this secret or wondered very much about it. I liked my school and my friends. Even my part-time job was fun; I got riding time in exchange for helping out at Chamberlain Stables, cleaning stalls and brushing horses. Plenty of other people had single parents. It was no big deal.

  I guess I was just happy.

  But then my mother got sick, and one night the secret slipped away from her.

  Mom had breast cancer and it had spread. Metastases, the doctor called them. She showed me the CAT scan of my mother’s brain where the tissue had been riddled with what looked like pale white bullets.

  She’d been at home at the end, in her own bed, which was just as she wanted it. So exhausted and in pain that when she’d finally allowed the hospice nurse to apply a morphine patch, she’d sunk into a deep sleep for nearly thirty-six hours. When it seemed like her body had come to some semblance of rest, she’d begun to talk. She’d whispered, giggled and rambled. Sometimes she seemed to hear my voice and sometimes she didn’t. It was like she was in a world of her own.

  “I want to go back,” Mom whispered, her eyes staring up at nothing.

  The hospice nurse had just finished getting her settled into bed and had gone for the night. “To the recliner?” I asked. She didn’t respond. “Janice just left,” I told her. “But I can help you if you want.” I pulled back the satin-edged blanket and put my hand beneath her to lift her upright. The soft flannel nightgown hung on her tiny frame, and I could feel the jut of her shoulder blades and ribs beneath the fabric. It felt like I held a ghost.

  “No,” she moaned, pulling away from me with surprising strength. Her eyes were closed and the pool of light from her bedside lamp highlighted violet shadows under her eyes and hollows beneath her cheekbones. “The compass spins from north to south.”

  “What?”

  Her eyes opened very wide; their blue irises looked pale and watery. “I want to go home,” she whispered. Her voice was so plaintive she sounded like a little girl. “To Trespass.”

  She wasn’t making any sense. “Tell me where you want to go,” I urged.

  “No.” She closed her eyes and drew her arms tight around her chest. “Don’t let them take the baby.”

  Those were the last words I heard her say.

  Mom died in December. It may sound strange to say this, but I think she had a good death. She wasn’t in pain and she wasn’t alone. But she was still gone. For a while I forgot all about her words. Grief made me slow and lazy. I hardly wanted to bathe, never mind go to school, learn stuff and make decisions about my life.

  But later her words came back to me, haunted me, in a way.

  I had to find out what they meant.

  As I stepped onto the dock of Trespass Island, my legs wobbled, searching for gravity. I was so focused on keeping my balance as I scrambled out of the boat that I hardly looked around. When I did straighten, I let out a little gasp.

  It was so … pretty. We stood on a long wooden pier that wrapped an L-shaped arm around a group of six or seven boats in a little inlet. Steps wound up a steep slope from the dock. Above, green canopies of pine trees sheltered a row of small clapboard houses facing the sea. Their window boxes spilled over with bright scarlet and yellow flowers that fluttered in the breeze.

  I turned to look at where we’d come from. Past the calm of Trespass Island’s harbor, it was just blue water as far as I could see. I squinted. There was a break in the smooth surface out there: an irregular ridge of small waves looked like it circled the whole island. What was it Ben Deare had called the reef? Oh yeah. The Hundred Hands.

  Remembering the black thing beneath the boat, I suppressed a shudder. Seaweed? Yeah, right. Seaweed didn’t swim. Ben Deare probably just didn’t want to scare me. Maybe there were sharks out there.

  “The village is just up the hill there,” said Ben. “But best if you stay here on the dock for now. First I’ve got to deliver this.” He held up a small cardboard box labeled with Priority Mail stickers and the words Fragile—Medical Supplies. “Won’t take but a minute. And then we’ll see what’s to be done with you. Stay here.”

  The wiry old man made his way up the flight of railroad-tie steps and disappeared.

  What’s to be done with me? I would be glad when people realized I should be the one to decide what was to be done with me.

  High overhead a single seagull wheeled, making a lonely, harsh cry of “Scree-scree.” There didn’t seem to be anyone else around, and I paced the dock, my steps creaking on the worn gray planks. I stopped and listened. Weird noises came from under the dock as water sloshed against the supports.

  There was a
symbol burned into the wood on one of the timbers. It looked like a pitchfork. There were others too; swirling designs that I didn’t recognize marked every upright post of the dock. There was that strange sound again, from beneath me.

  I walked to the edge and peered down. Strands of seaweed undulated in water so clear I could see the rocks and sand at the bottom as if through a green glass lens. Tiny fish no bigger than my pinkie darted in and out of the shadows. Something made a gurgling sound beneath my feet and I could hear, very faintly, the sound of dripping.

  Drip, drip, drip.

  The oddest notion came over me: that something had just climbed out of the water and was under the dock. Waiting and listening.

  I backed away from the edge and bent, trying to peer through the dark spaces between the planks. A spurt of water suddenly shot up through one of the gaps, accompanied by a hissing noise.

  I bolted up, grabbed my things and ran.

  I was out of breath by the time I got to the top of the hill. My chest was tight and the familiar dry cough began. Stupid asthma. If I was going to run for any length of time, I had to use the inhaler beforehand. That’s what I did for gym. Unfortunately, getting scared out of my wits didn’t lend itself to taking proper preventive measures. Fumbling, I got out my inhaler and took two quick puffs. There was probably a perfectly normal explanation for the eerie noises beneath the dock. I just couldn’t think of one. So I tried to forget that peculiar hissing noise and the feeling that something had been peering up at me from the dark. As the ache in my lungs eased, I looked around.

  Where the steps leading up from the dock stopped, it was only a few yards to a small, gravel-covered parking lot with a few dusty trucks and golf carts. Past this was the downtown area of Trespass, if that was what I should call it. A single paved road meandered away from the parking lot, lined on either side with small houses and shops with old-fashioned-looking glass-fronted displays. There was a hardware store, a coffee shop and a place called Flo’s Wave-n-Curl. At the corner closest to me, a sign read TRESPASS CHAMBER OF COMMERCE WELCOMES YOU. A traffic sign on the other side of that warned SPEED LIMIT 20 MPH.