I look around, and my eyes settle on a small cedar tree at the edge of the property where the land plummets down to the sea. “And what’s that tree saying right now?” I ask him, fighting back a smile, the first I have smiled in days.

“It just keeps pointing its branches to the water. All the trees in the yard do. Like they’re trying to tell us something. But I can’t figure out what.”

Words rise into my mind. He’s out there swimming, waiting for me, I think. But I shake the thought away.

“Have you had any luck,” Ebb asks, “finding more clues?”

I tell him about the hospital, and the Murderer, and everything I’ve read in my book, and how none of it has led anywhere. The more I talk, the more my frustration and worry tumbles out.

“I still don’t even know how a witch weapon works,” I say. “I still have no idea how to find one. I’m completely defenseless, which means I’m no closer to finding out how to kill a witch.”

The wind is blowing so hard, my hair keeps flying into my mouth as I talk. Ebb looks at me shivering, then up at the sky.

“Let’s go somewhere away from the wind,” he says finally. “I want to show you something.”

Ebb leads me down the path that crisscrosses down from my high yard to the beach, winding through rocks and steep crags.

“Where are we going?” I say, looking up at the cliffs all around us, feeling nervous the farther we get from home on such a wild night. Far above, the cloud shepherds are busy herding shapes of mist. Ebb’s answer doesn’t exactly reassure me.

“Better just see it when we get there. It’ll sound too creepy otherwise.”

Still, I follow, scrabbling clumsily down the steep rocky trail as Ebb floats easily ahead of me. We emerge onto the beach, at the edge of a cave Germ and I used to explore when we were younger.

He leads me to the lip of the rocky hollow, and we hurry inside out of the wind.

“Don’t worry. High tide won’t be for a while,” he says. “If there’s one thing I know now, it’s the tides.”

I turn my flashlight on and look around. It’s a dismal place—dark and empty, musty, mildewed and forlorn. Ebb turns to me, looking almost embarrassed.

“Where are we?” I ask. But with a sick thud in my chest, my eyes light on something that gives me the answer before he can.

On the wall of the cave, just visible in the beam of my light, are words etched in stone: Here on this day May the 5th, Robert Alby and his parents were taken by the tide.