Fisher went to the kiosk for coffee while Kate walked out onto the front deck and stood in the icy air. The ferry ride was only half an hour, so soon Belport rose ahead of her like a giant turtle shell spotted with moss. A bank of late-morning fog was rolling in across the water, shrouding parts of the island.

She thought about what Fisher had said, about being prepared for what they might find. If they didn’t talk about the monsters in this world, then they wouldn’t be ready for them when they jumped out from under the bed. What monsters were waiting for her in Belport?

8

THE WIFE

Lori stood on the front verandah, madly chewing the nail of her pinkie finger, wearing the face of someone who had just made a wrong turn in a bad neighbourhood. Eddie had gone ahead of her to catch the bus, but she was hovering. There was something on her mind.

Abby watched her from the kitchen window, skulking behind the succulent planter box that lived on the windowsill, like a documentarian waiting to see what her subject might do next. Lori, with no idea she was being spied on, took two steps off the verandah. She then turned, marched back to the front door, hesitated, then turned again.

Abby knocked on the glass. Lori flinched.

‘Something on your mind?’ she called. ‘You look like your father on the night you were born.’

‘It’s nothing,’ Lori called back, then started down the steps and into the front yard.

Abby stepped into her sneakers and caught up to her. She was still in her pyjamas, but there was nobody around to judge.

‘What’s going on, Lori?’ Abby asked.

‘It’s nothing. Honestly.’ She looked down at her boots, kicked them against the bottom verandah step. ‘I was just going to ask, is everything okay between you and Dad?’

‘Everything’s fine,’ Abby said. ‘Why?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s probably nothing. I’m gonna miss my bus.’

‘Jesus, Lori, shit or get off the pot.’

She sighed. ‘Fine. Dad was up super early again this morning, and I get up super early to pee, and I guess I thought you guys must be fighting or something because when I went to the bathroom door, I heard him…’

‘What?’

‘I don’t want to say.’

‘Ew, Lori.’

‘God, yuck, no, nothing like that.’

‘Then what?’ Abby asked.

‘Maybe I was just hearing things, but I’m pretty sure he was … crying’.

Ray didn’t cry. Lori must have been hearing things, and if she wasn’t, then there were a million logical explanations. The trouble was, right now, as Abby drifted from room to room in her empty home, she couldn’t think of one.