“Hey there, People On Your First Day,” Darcy interrupts, ramming her spoon into her half-eaten pudding. She scans the table like a cobra ready to strike. “Jack, Vance, me, and Marcos have been Nightlight residents for over half a year. We LIVE here. So, while you two got your asses cut up on your first day, Jack and Vance have been stealing evidence for months and haven’t been caught a single time. They’re capable. And Molly, we haven’t commandeered the boat yet from a lack of desire. If some of us take the boat and leave, the rest will be stuck here. And your escape will taste like shit whenever you think of who got left behind. If that matters to you.”

Molly’s scowl hardens at the implication. “So, you want to shut down Nightlight?”

Darcy returns to her pudding. “I want to present a story against them, backed by evidence.”

“You have evidence?” I ask, pins and needles collecting in my toes.

“Maybe. We’ve been making copies of camper injury reports.”

“You can’t use mine,” Marcos pipes up from the end of the bench. “I’ll help y’all in other ways, but…if this gets out, I don’t want to have to go on record. Y’know, talk about stuff in public…” He retreats into silence, sipping lemonade and looking thoroughly anguished. Nightmarish fantasies of what injuries Marcos may have suffered arrive in my mind: Cuts from Miss Manners’s jagged nails…the Reverend smacking his neck…Briggs causing any number of bruises or shattered bones…

“Don’t worry,” Darcy sneers. “There’s plenty of other reports.”

“Are these injury reports enough to, you know, shut Nightlight down?” I ask, the depressing answer already forming in everyone’s eyes.

“Of course, people love believing gay people over youth ministers,” Molly says. “It’s their favorite pastime.”

“We’re going to try,” Darcy says. “And we’re gonna sprinkle some positivity on top.” She straightens her wig like it is a painting knocked askew. “What would be a slam dunk is if we had a really vicious attack to pin on them. An attack where the victim eventually died. You could even call it a murder.” Did he tell you how Rigo died? Briggs’s taunt echoes, and I wince back a crack in the little bottle in my heart. Had there been an outright murder when Ricky was attacked? As we stare at Darcy, ominously transfixed, she continues: “Up ’til yesterday, I could only dream of such a crime falling in my lap.” A multitude of eyes land on me, but I don’t break from Darcy. She and I understand: she has evidence against Nightlight to put a permanent For Sale sign on this island, and me solving the Ricky Hannigan attack would be the closer.

There’s only the small issue of catching a killer and somehow escaping alive.