Then, more seriously, it dawns on me. If Ellis and I are right, which we are, about it being the same person leaving the note in Roxy’s car all those years ago and the letter in their mailbox just months before, it means there’s a possibility they’re still here. Maybe we’ve already talked to them and don’t know it.

I’m thinking about all this when I remember it’s Monday at four thirty in the morning and it is completely, utterly silent.

No noise. No stirring. Nothing is open yet. No one is preparing for the day yet.

Not even Frank.

Call received approx. 4 a.m. Sunday morning from resident who discovered property known to belong to Catherine O’Hare [alias Roxy Raines].

Then where was he today – on a Monday morning? Surely he should be prepping even earlier on a Monday. And maybe it was decades ago, but these people don’t seem the sort to change the way things are done.

And Lenore had said she wanted to get the ferry early the day Roxy’s guitar was found, but it was Labor Sunday and ferries weren’t running until later. Frank wouldn’t have been prepping the ferry then. So what was he really doing out by the docks so early – and whatever it was, why did he lie about it?

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 21

The sun is setting on the way, red to pink to purple, stretching all the way across a clear expanse of sky, the ocean reflecting it back at itself. The edge of the heat has burst and my perpetual trail of sweat in between my shoulder blades during the day has mercifully dried. And there’s the No-Names parking lot, spooky and empty as ever.

Ellis and I had arranged to meet after work; this time I’m here before him and my aloneness unsettles me. The woods are just as sinister as I thought them the day I arrived, glaring in through the backyard of the Willowwood. I get up close to the border of the No-Names and read the same signs I passed that first day. NO TRESPASSING.

The toothy scratch of tyres on asphalt behind me makes me jump. Ellis pulls up. ‘Hey. What are you doing?’

‘Have the woods always been blocked off? And is it all of the woods?’ I ask, realizing immediately that I sound a little dazed.

‘As long as I’ve b-b-been around, I’m pretty sure. And yeah, the fence runs from side to side.’

‘The signs look beaten up. Like they’ve been there a while.’

‘P-probably.’

‘It seems weird that they’d have this whole bit of the island – like, way more than half of the total land mass – blocked off. Wouldn’t developing it be at least a sort of tourism pull?’