There aren’t any glasses, so Heath takes a swig, but before he passes it around, he says, “Should we take bets?”
“On what?” Rose asks.
“How long until the first body turns up in the harbor.”
“That’s morbid,” Rose says with a grimace.
“Maybe. But it’s going to happen whether we want it to or not.”
Bo and I exchange a look.
Rose exhales a breath through her nose. “Three days,” she says meekly, grabbing the bottle from Heath’s hands and taking a drink.
“Three and a half,” Heath guesses, eyeing her. But I think he only says it to be cute, playing off her number.
Rose hands the bottle to Bo and he holds it low, looking down at it like the answer is somewhere inside. “I hope it doesn’t happen at all,” he finally says.
“That’s not really a guess,” Rose points out, lifting an eyebrow.
“Sure it is,” Heath defends. “He’s guessing no days. Which has never happened, but I suppose it’s possible. Maybe no one will drown this summer.”
“Unlikely,” Rose adds, looking a little disgusted with this whole game.
Bo takes a quick slug of the red wine then holds it out for me. I take it carefully, sliding my thumb down the neck of the bottle, then look up at the group. “Tonight,” I say, tipping the bottle to my lips and taking a full swig.
Rose shivers slightly and Heath wraps an arm around her. “Let’s talk about something else,” she suggests.
“Whatever you want.” And he smiles down at her.
“I want to count ghosts!” she chirps, her mood returned.
Heath releases her and frowns, confused. “You want to do what?”
“It’s a game Penny and I used to play when we were kids, remember Penny?” She looks to me and I nod. “We’d look for ghosts in the beam of light from the lighthouse as it circled around the island. You get points for every one that you see. One point if you see it on the island and two points if you see one out on the water.”
“And you actually see these ghosts?” Heath asks, one eyebrow scrunching up into his forehead.
“Yes. They’re everywhere,” Rose answers with an artful smirk. “You just have to know where to look.”
“Show me,” Heath says. And even though he’s obviously skeptical, he smiles as she drags him to the window. It’s a childish game, but they press their palms against the glass, laughing already.
I hand the bottle back to Bo, and he takes another drink.
“What are you reading?” I ask.
“A book I found in the cottage.”
“About what?”
He slides it out from under his arm and sets it on the white desk. The History and Legend of Sparrow, Oregon. The front cover is an old photograph of the harbor taken from Ocean Avenue. A cobblestone sidewalk is in the foreground, and the harbor is crowded with old fishing boats and massive steamships. It’s more of a pamphlet than a real book, and you can find it at just about every coffee shop and restaurant, and in the lobby of each bed-and-breakfast in town. It’s a tourist’s guide to everything that happened in Sparrow two centuries ago and everything that has occurred since. It was written by Anderson Fotts, an artist and poet who used to live in Sparrow until his son drowned seven years ago and then he moved away.
“Brushing up on our town’s history, huh?”
“Not much else to do in the evening around here.” He has a point.
I stare down at the book, knowing its contents all too well. On page thirty-seven is a portrait of the three Swan sisters sketched by Thomas Renshaw, a man who claimed to have met the sisters before they were drowned. Marguerite stands on the left, the tallest of the three, with long auburn hair, full lips, and a sharp jaw, her eyes staring straight ahead. Aurora is in the middle with soft waves of hair and bright full-moon eyes. Hazel, on the right, has plain, smaller features and a braid twisted across her shoulder. Her eyes are focused away, like she’s looking at something in the distance. They are all beautiful—captivating, as if they were shifting slightly on the page.
“So you believe in the sisters now?” I ask.
“I haven’t decided.”
The beam of light slides across his face, and I follow it out to sea, where it cuts through the storm and the impending rain, warning sailors and fishermen that an island lies in their path. “You shouldn’t go into town if you don’t have to from now on,” I tell him.
Both his eyebrows lift. “Why not?”
“It’s safer if you stay here on the island. You can’t trust anyone in town. . . . Any girl you meet could be one of them.”
His eyelids lower, partly concealing the dark tint of his green eyes. Verdant and rueful. He is familiar in a way I can’t pin down. Like seeing someone you knew a long time ago, but they’ve changed in the passing years, become someone different and new. “Even you?” he asks, like I’m joking.
“Even me.” I want him to understand how serious I am.
“So no talking to girls?” he clarifies.
“Precisely.”
The right side of his mouth turns up into a grin, a fractional parting of lips, and he looks like he might laugh, but then he takes a sip from the bottle instead. I know it sounds absurd, maybe even a little irrational, to warn him against speaking to any girls. But I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t mean it. Most local boys—if they truly believe in the legend—will steer clear of all girls until the summer solstice. Better to minimize the risk. But Bo, like most outsiders, won’t take it seriously. He’s in danger just by being in this town.
“That’s three!” Rose bellows from the window, and Heath shakes his head. Apparently, Rose is winning the ghost-hunting game. As usual.
“Where are you from?” I ask Bo, after the beam of light passes around the lighthouse a full three times.
“Washington.”
I arch an eyebrow at him, expecting him to narrow it down to a city or county or nearest proximity to a Starbucks. But he doesn’t. “That’s extremely vague,” I say. “Can you be more specific?”
His cheekbones tighten, a rivulet of tension. “Near the middle” is all he offers up.
“I can see this won’t be easy.” I rub my tongue along the roof of my mouth.
“What?”
“Figuring out who you really are.”
He taps his fingers against the side of the bottle, a rhythm to a song, I think. “What do you want to know?” he asks.
“Did you go to high school in this fictional, near-the-middle town?”
Again I think he’s going to smile, but he stifles it before it escapes his lips. “Yeah. I graduated this year.”
“So you graduated then promptly escaped your make-believe town?”
“Basically.”
“Why’d you leave?”
He ceases the tapping against the bottle. “My brother died.”
A blast of wind and sideways rain sprays the windows, and I flinch. “I’m . . . sorry.” Bo shakes his head and tips the bottle to his lips. The minutes pass, and the question resting inside my throat starts to feel strangled, cutting off the air to my lungs. “How did he die?”