At least, that’s what she told herself. But there was another reason she remained silent: Pita was vindictive. Elizaveta didn’t want to get into her bad books for fear Pita might turn Jesus against Elizaveta herself. Pita wielded a surprising amount of control over her brother, and if push came to shove, Elizaveta didn’t know with whom Jesus’s loyalty would lie. If he dumped Elizaveta, what would become of her then? The twin girls she was tutoring turned fourteen this year; they would enter boarding school in autumn. Consequently, she would be out of a job, and her visa expired early next year. She would have no choice but to return to Russia…to poverty. And she couldn’t do that. She’d worked too hard to get to where she was in society now. She couldn’t go back to waiting an hour in line for a loaf of bread, or to teaching fifty-hour weeks for a couple of thousand Rubles—the equivalent to what she currently earned in one morning.

“What’s taking them so long?” Jesus said, tugging Elizaveta from her reflections. He was staring out the door at the slanted rain and the swaying trees.

“They’ve only been gone thirty minutes,” Pita said.

“How long do you think it takes to walk the circumference of the island?”

She stubbed her cigarette on the floorboards. “Longer than thirty minutes.”

“You know,” Jesus said, “we’re going to be stuck here overnight now. We’re going to be stuck here with whoever killed Rosa’s brother.”

“We don’t know he’s dead,” Elizaveta said. “All we know is he screamed.”

“Eliza’s right,” Pita said. “He might just be injured.”

Jesus shook his head. “Like Jack said, if he was simply injured, he would have gone looking for Rosa. He would have been calling her name. We would have heard him.”

“What about Lucinda?” Elizaveta asked. “Do you think she was attacked too?”

“Of course,” Jesus said. “Otherwise we would have come across her already.”

“Unless she took canoe back to docks.”

Jesus shook his head again. “If she did that, she would have gotten help. She would have returned with the police.”

“So who attacked them?”

“Thugs,” Jesus said.

“Thugs?” Elizaveta repeated skeptically. “Why would thugs be out here, in middle of nowhere?”

“We are.”

“Well—why would thugs attack them?”

Jesus shrugged. “Rosa said her brother sent her away so he could be alone with Lucinda, right? So they were getting it on, these guys saw them, they got a hard on, they wanted a ride.”

“You think they killed Miguel so they could rape and kill Lucinda?”

“There’s a motive behind every murder,” Jesus said. “And when the victim or victims are strangers, the motives are usually sex or money.”

“What about a ghost?” Pita asked. “What are a ghost’s motives?”

“We’re not talking about ghosts,” Jesus said.