They continued in the opposite direction, away from the Savage house. No idea where they would go, only certain they couldn't go back to his childhood home, walking under a pall of silence for half a mile or more. Tired, confused, frightened.

Finally, Sheila spoke. She was worried—not just about the Midwives or the visions they'd had at the stones, but because she hadn't taken her birth control in days. She'd forgotten the pills on her bedside drawer, and Martin had come inside her. She'd felt it trickle cold down her inner thighs as they hiked up the bluff.

"What happened back there, it can't be a coincidence, can it?"

"What do you mean?"

"I saw Helen Birch pass the car when we were waiting for the ferry."

"My car..." Martin said glumly, wondering if it had survived. Wondering if they would be able to salvage it from the wreck. Upset that he'd lost Tansy, their only protection against Barclay—and now also the Midwives. "Sorry, go on."

"No. No, you should take a minute to mourn. It was a beautiful car."

He laughed. Prodded her again to continue.

"When Helen went down the hill, she had a tray covered in aluminum foil. When she came back, the tray was gone."

"What are you thinking? She poisoned the ferry crew?"

"When I went to Geraldine's to return her Tupperware, she gave me this tea she said Helen made. It was delicious. But then I started hallucinating—bizarre, just terrible things. I was sure she drugged me. And she knew things about me it wasn't possible for her to know. About my sister. My mother."

"Well, okay. Let's say she did drug the ferry crew. To what purpose?"

"To keep us from leaving the island?"

"Why wouldn't they just poison us?"

He had her there. The motive completely fell apart the moment it was picked at.

"How about this," he said. "Do you think it's a coincidence the ferry crashed where it did? That we ended up there? I don't know about you, but it felt like we were meant to find those stones. That someone wanted us to."

"But why?"

"Maybe they needed to tell their side of the story? No matter what Ruby and the others have done since, you have to admit what happened to those little girls was tragic. Maybe more than the crash itself."

"It was awful."

"Maybe they needed someone to know? Outsiders. An impartial jury."

"Maybe... but how could they know the ferry would crash at that exact spot?"

"Yeah, I guess that's a little too convenient, isn't it?"

"A little. What I wonder, does everyone in town know what those women truly are? Are we dealing with a community-wide cult? Or are they completely oblivious?"

Her question triggered a memory. "The day we first got here, Nadine asked if I knew what a 'glamour' was. Something about making things look different than they were. 'Like the emperor's new clothes,' she said. She was talking about Ruby and the other midwives."