Page 26

Nineteen

Benny

Present Day

“Benny!”

Benny heard Zara’s voice and felt a jolt of reality grounding her. For a second, she was confused as to where she was. Then she remembered: Lighthouse. Storm. The riddle. But she couldn’t shake the feeling she’d just seen something supernatural with her own eyes. Evelyn’s island was real .

“Hurry!” Zara sounded anxious.

Benny turned to Earl. “Thanks for the…tour,” she said.

Earl blinked too, staring at her as if she waking up from a dream. “Sorry? Oh. Yes. Tour.” He nodded, his eyes still on the water and the greenish hue to the dark, stormy sky. “You’re welcome. Please come back for our Save the Lighthouse gala on June twelfth.”

“Thanks,” she said. She gave the water—now choppy and churning, no sign of an island—one last glance, then rushed down the circular stairs. Zara and Ryan were arguing.

“My dad says we have to go,” Ryan told her. “The storm came in out of nowhere, and we need to get back to port.”

“But we haven’t figured out the riddle yet, and who knows if we’re going to get back here before the Blood Orange Moon?” Zara pleaded. “We can’t leave.”

Benny agreed, but she couldn’t imagine Harris leaving them behind. “You haven’t found anything?”

Ryan shook his head. “No maidens. No pictures of sirens. No compasses. Maybe we got this riddle wrong, and the lighthouse isn’t the location of the next clue.”

“We didn’t get the riddle wrong! The answer is the lighthouse,” Benny insisted as a wind gust seemed to make the entire lighthouse creak. “Evelyn commissioned this place, and I suspect she imagined seeing the island from her balcony.” She looked around the dark room. “The clue has to be here somewhere.”

“Then we have to stall Ryan’s dad and find it,” Zara decided.

Ryan’s phone rang, and he pulled it from the pocket of the raincoat he was wearing. He looked at the screen and winced. “It’s my dad calling again. If I don’t answer, he’s going to come in here and drag us out. I mean it. We have to go.”

“We can’t!” Zara argued. “Benny only has today and tomorrow otherwise…”

“ Guys ,” Benny interrupted, still feeling shaky after what just happened in the tower. “I saw the island.”

Zara did a double take. “Wait. What? Where?”

“You mean it’s real? Like really real?” Ryan asked, gaping as his phone started to ring again. “You’re sure?”

“I saw it with my own eyes, and so did Earl,” Benny told them. “It was there, and then it was gone…which means we’re close. The entrance to the island has to be nearby.” She glanced out the window again. “All this time I thought the island would just pop up like a mirage, but maybe the key to finding the island is knowing where the hidden passageway is to locate it.”

“What do you mean?” Zara asked.

“If the island only appears every two hundred years, right around the Blood Orange Moon, then the reason we haven’t found it yet is because we haven’t located the spot where the entrance to the island is,” Benny realized. “In Evelyn’s journal pages, she talks about the entrance to the island being a sandbar hidden behind bushes, invisible to the naked eye. She finds it and shows her friends. What if it’s the same now? I saw the island when I looked out the lighthouse window. We’re close, but not close enough to walk to it. We still need to find the secret passageway—maybe it’s the beach, like it was for Evelyn, or maybe, since beaches grow and recede over time, there was a second way to the island, and Evelyn learned about the second way, and she’s trying to lead us to the other path.”

“But why a game then?” Ryan said, frustrated. “Why not tell you where the island is? Wouldn’t that be easier?”

“I’m not sure. Her letters make me feel like she’s afraid people might try to find the island for the wrong reasons,” Benny told them.

Ryan ran a hand through his hair. “It’s hard to know where the secret passageway is without reading her journal. Maybe there is something in those pages we would understand that you wouldn’t. We’re from here, you know.

“You might be right.” Was she being a fool not to share Evelyn’s private journals? She couldn’t believe what she was saying about the island’s location, but she believed it with her whole heart now. She’d seen too much not to. “I know this all sounds crazy, but…”

“No. It doesn’t. If you believe, then maybe the island knows and that’s why you just got a glimpse of it.” Zara bit her lip. “Not sure why Earl did too, but…”

“So where is the island’s entry point? Is it the lighthouse?” Ryan asked, peering out at the water. “If it is, why can’t Zara and I see it too?”

“I don’t know,” Benny admitted. “And I didn’t see the island long, so I’m thinking it’s not the lighthouse. If it was, we’d see a way there, right? But we’re close.” She started to pace. “Earl told me there are rumors about there being tunnels from this lighthouse to the port. Something about a cave that they used to transport liquor during the Prohibition Era. And Evelyn mentions there being a cave on the island that they’re too scared to explore.”

Ryan frowned. “I’ve never heard of a cave, but there is a Prohibition room under Hooked. People like to go behind the bar and see the trapdoor they used to get downstairs and accept deliveries. Are you saying the entrance could have been there the whole time?”

“It could have been. But maybe it only appears around the Blood Orange Moon,” Benny guessed. “Either way, if it is, there’s something Evelyn knows we need to find here first,” Benny glanced around the room. “We just have to find it.” Siren. Maiden. Compass , she repeated . Something has to be here.

Ryan’s phone rang again. “Okay, I can buy you a few minutes if I pretend to faint in front of my dad. I’ve done it before when he asked me to play pickleball.” Lightning lit up the room followed by a loud crack of thunder. “I don’t know how long I can stall, so hurry.”

“We will,” Benny promised as Ryan ran back down the stairs. She turned to Zara. “Tell me where you searched so far.”

Zara clasped her hands together. “Okay, we’ve checked every painting. Every floorboard. Every dresser drawer. No sirens. No compasses. No maidens. Some of this stuff doesn’t even look authentic. I think they are replicas of what they think would be in a lighthouse keeper’s quarters. It can’t be downstairs. They already cleared out that area for the gala. There’s a pile of things stacked in the corner, but it looks like all lighthouse promotional material.” She motioned to a child-size bed everything was crammed behind. A Save the Lighthouse poster was sticking out of one of the boxes.

Benny looked around—Zara was right. The space was pretty bare. She walked around, touching window frames, looking for seams that were in odd places, listening to the sound of the wind hitting the windows. Benny searched under the bed and checked behind a painting of the lighthouse again to be sure and came up empty. Frustrated, Benny kicked the boxes on the floor behind the bed. They fell over, pulling a blanket off something in the corner. Benny froze. “Zara? I think I found something.”

Zara did a double take. “You did! That’s a figurehead. My parents have one in their office, believe it or not. It’s a seafaring tradition to have one on the front of the ship and that one is a—”

“Maiden,” they said at the same time.

They pushed aside the remaining boxes and pulled out a large wooden carving of a woman. The paint was faint and chipping off her.

“I wonder what ship this is from,” Zara said, her hands skimming the front of the figurehead. “My parents said pirate ships always had a carved wooden sculpture on the front of the ship to guarantee safe passage. They thought it was bad luck to travel without one. This one is old. Like really old. And definitely a maiden.”

“Or a siren.” Benny’s heart began to beat fast again. “Think it’s old enough to belong to a ship in Evelyn’s era?”

Zara studied the markings on the carving—the woman was adorned with jewelry around her neck and a crown on her head. “If I had to guess, this is older. I’ve seen female ones lots of times, but see this crown? I’ve never seen one of a queen before.”

This was it. Benny could feel it. Could something be hidden inside it? Benny knocked on the figurehead. It was pretty solid. She kept knocking on various locations till she came to the base where the woman’s bare feet were, and this time, she could hear an echo. She peered closer. “Look! See that seam?” she said, excited as she rubbed her finger along an area that appeared to be glued. “This has been broken before.”

“Maybe it broke and… Wait! You’re not going to break it again. Are you? My parents would die. Benny, there has to be another—”

There was no time to debate this. Benny felt sick at the thought of what she was going to do, because if she was wrong— Sorry Evelyn! —she was about to destroy a piece of history. She picked up a black bird paperweight on the nearby desk and lifted it over her head.

“Wait!” Zara said, as the bird connected with the figurehead, sending wood pieces splintering.

Benny inhaled sharply when she saw the hollowed-out inside of the foot had a purple velvet sack and an envelope nestled inside. A black bird was stamped on the pouch.

““It’s a pouch! Like the one in the paintings from the attic.” Zara said, leaning over and staring at it.

“We found the next clue,” Benny whispered. Her hands were shaking. She pulled both items out, being careful with the envelope, which was yellowed and fragile. On the front, as suspected, was her name, along with words that made her body tingle.

For Everly Benedict. Herein lies your final riddle.