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He swings.
I close my eyes, screaming, waiting for the blow to connect with my skull.
Instead, a shot rings out, the sound careening across the cove. My eyes fly open in time to see the oar explode into a thousand splinters. I shut them again as wood sprays my face. I duck, trying to avoid it.
The boat tips.
I tip with it, tumbling backward, over the side of the boat and into Lake Midnight.
43
My fall through the water is brief. Just a quick, disorienting drop before I slam into something a few feet from the surface. Wood, I think. Slick with moss and algae and a hundred years of lake water rising and falling.
A roof.
As I’m realizing this, the wood beneath me buckles, giving way. Soon I’m falling again. Still underwater but now also surrounded by walls, encased within them.
Peaceful Valley Asylum.
I’m inside it, dropping from the ceiling to the floor below. I brace myself for another smash through it. It never comes. Instead, I bounce off the floor and drift upward.
Faint light trickles through algae-streaked windows. It’s enough brightness for me to see an empty room taken over by mud. Everything is tilted—walls, ceiling, doorframe. The door itself has come off its hinges and now sits askew, revealing a short hall, stairs, more light. I swim toward them, struggling to make it through the doorway, across the hall, down the steps.
At the bottom, the front door gapes open. The door itself sits on the floor, all but blending in with the lake bottom. To my left is a sitting room. There’s a hole in the wall where bricks and floorboards and scraps of wallpaper have tumbled out. A striped basscircles the room. I swim out the open door, passing from inside to outside, even though it’s all part of the same watery landscape.
Pain pulses through my body. My lungs burn. I need air. I need sleep. I start to swim upward, heading to the surface, when something catches my eye.
A skull.
Bleached white.
Jaw missing.
Eye sockets aimed at the sky.
Scattered around it are more bones. A dozen, at least. I glimpse the arch of ribs, the curl of fingers, a second skull a few yards from the first.
The girls.
I know because nestled among the bones, shining faintly in the muck, is a length of gold chain and a locket in the shape of a heart. A tiny emerald sits in its center.
Something enters the water behind me. I feel it more than see it—a shuddering of the lake. An arm reaches out and wraps around my waist. Then I’m tugged upward, away from the girls, toward the water’s surface.
Soon we’re breaking through Lake Midnight. I see sky, trees, the camp’s other motorboat bobbing on the water a few yards away. Within it stands Detective Flynn, his gun trained on Chet, who drops the decimated oar.
And I see Theo. Swimming next to me. Arm still around my waist. Lake water sloshing against his chin.
“Are you okay?” he says.
I think of Vivian, Natalie, and Allison lying directly below us.
I think of all the years they spent down there, waiting for me to find them.
So when Theo asks again if I’m okay, I can only nod, choke out a sob, and let the tears flow.
44
I sit in the front seat of Detective Flynn’s police-issued sedan, the hospital a distant memory in the rearview mirror. I ended up being more bruised and battered than I initially thought. The doctor’s diagnosis was startling. A concussion from the oar. A sprained ankle from the fall. Lacerations, dehydration, a persistent headache.