Page 12 of Skalterra By Nightmare (The Skalterra Duology #1)

Galahad didn’t call me that night. I made sure to be in bed, determined to be ready this time, but after drifting to sleep without help from any other-worldly summons, my dreams remained my own. They were still stressful, of course, full of teeth falling out of my mouth and chasing after a faceless figure who I knew was Riley, even if I couldn’t get a good look at him.

When I woke and realized I hadn’t been to Skalterra, I was surprised at the knot of worry that lumped in my stomach. A few nights ago, I’d been sure they were all imaginary. Now, I hated the thought of the rotsbane hurting them.

Around lunchtime, the day got worse.

The Friday tourists had kept me busy enough that morning to not have a chance to say hello to Liam, but the strained smile he put on for the customers told me there was still no word from Riley.

He’d just clocked out for his lunch break when Sabrina burst into the shop, her strawberry blonde curls wild and her cheeks red with anger.

“They’re gone!”

she thundered, drawing the attention of every customer. Liam froze where he was hanging his apron on the hook behind the ice-cream bar.

“What’re gone?” he asked.

“Riley’s posters!”

Angry and indignant tears streamed down her cheeks.

“I was up in Port Fletcherton, because Mom likes the bakery there, and I wanted to surprise her, so I took the car up north to see if they still had her favorites—”

“You’re rambling.”

Liam took her by the shoulders as gently as her wild gesticulating would allow.

“What do you mean Riley’s posters are gone?”

Sabrina tried to explain through hiccups.

“The bakery! We put a poster there! But I noticed it wasn’t there anymore, so I checked the marina! And that one was gone! Then I checked the other shops, and all the posters are missing!”

“Okay.”

Liam shot me a side-glance, and I hoped he didn’t see the guilt etched across my face.

“It’s alright. Someone from City Hall probably took them down because we didn’t get approval. You know, dumb bureaucratic stuff.”

Sabrina pushed him away, shoving him hard against his chest. Gams hurried out of the basement and to Sabrina’s side. Sabrina, despite her agitated state, allowed Gams to pull her into a hug.

“No, Liam,”

she hiccuped into Gams hair.

“They’re all gone. I drove up north to the other towns and checked. One of the storekeepers said some girl took them down.”

“It’s alright, come upstairs.”

Gams took Sabrina by the elbow to lead her behind the register to the apartment stairs. Jonquil chirped her support, bounding up the steps ahead of them.

“Tell you what, I’ll send Wren in my car to replace the posters. They’ll be back up before you know it.”

I loved Gams, but I knew there were no new flyers for me to post. I was doing her dirty work again.

Liam looked as if he’d aged another ten years since Sabrina had run in, like gravity and grief alike weighed on his handsome face just a little more than it had before. He waved a hand towards the street.

“I’ve got it covered here,”

he said.

“You remember where the library is, right? Mr. Lane should have the posters on file still. If he wants to charge you to print more, have him put it on my account.”

I nodded, unsure of what else to say, what I even could say. However, the library wasn’t a bad idea. I’d happily go anywhere where I wouldn’t have to look Liam in the eye.

Mr. Lane was a friendly old man in a plaid newsie hat that hid the bald spot I knew shined bright in the center of his scalp. He was older than Gams, though he walked with the same spritely step. I’d always liked Mr. Lane when Mom and I would visit Gams for holidays, and after dealing with Galahad, it was nice to be reminded that not all old men were ornery grouches.

“Shame about Riley, it really is,”

he said as we stood over the library printer. While Gams’s shop had been full of tourists, the library was nearly empty. Wood beams ran across the slanted ceiling, giving way to large windows that looked over main street at the base of the hill the library stood upon. I could see the roof of the shop from here, and beyond that, the harbor.

Mr. Lane beamed as he handed me the new stack of missing flyers. I wasn’t sure if his face or Riley’s, printed in black and white ink, did more to work my stomach into knots of fetid guilt.

The papers were warm, and I slipped them into the backpack I’d brought with me. It was a shame to waste so much ink, paper, and time, but I knew Gams had given me this task to make sure no one saw the new flyers.

“What do I owe you?”

I asked, zipping up my backpack. Liam had said to put the printing cost on his library account, but I’d never let him pay when I knew these flyers were destined for the trashcan. I wouldn’t have printed them at all if I didn’t think Sabrina might ask Mr. Lane about it later.

Mr. Lane patted my shoulder, and a gentle grimace flitted across his wrinkled face.

“It’s on the house,”

he assured me.

A contemptuous snort echoed from a nearby armchair, and a bespectacled face framed by frizzing white hair popped up from the other side of the seat to glare at us.

“You’ll run the library into the ground like that, Ronald,”

the woman croaked.

A new wrinkled face, laden with heavy blush and blue eyeshadow, peeked out from behind the chair back next to the first woman’s.

“Don’t listen to Sarah. You know she’s a harpy.”

Gladys, Gams’s friend from the other night, winked at me.

“And you know that boy is dead,”

Sarah snapped back. Gladys swatted at Sarah with a magazine, and I clutched the backpack of flyers closer to my chest.

“What do you mean?”

I came around the chairs to look at the women straight on. Both had bright magazines in hand and heavy shawls to stave off the library’s air conditioning.

Sarah adjusted her glasses and pressed her lips into a thin, stern line.

“Everybody who’s been in Keel Watch long enough knows it.”

She shrugged.

“They’re just all too afraid to admit it.”

“Sarah,”

Gladys warned under her breath.

“People go missing, and they don’t come back. It’s cruel to pretend that they will.”

“The only cruel thing here is you, you old bat.”

Mr. Lane pulled the magazine from Sarah’s hands, but she was already reaching for a new one from the stack that sat on the table between her and Gladys.

“Oh, I’m the old bat?”

Sarah’s near-translucent eyebrows shot up over the rims of her glasses.

“You’re older than I am, Lane!”

“Then respect your elders. I won’t have you talking about that poor boy like that in my library.”

“My tax dollars pay for this library, so I’ll talk how I like.”

“We all pay taxes!”

“Then what are you doing spending your own tax dollars on flyers for a dead boy?”

I jammed my hand into my pockets, fishing for change.

“How much?” I asked.

“What?”

Mr. Lane blinked at me, and Sarah blew a frizzy white curl out of her face as she settled back into her armchair.

“For printing.”

I found a few crumpled dollars in my back pocket.

“This should cover it, right? I don’t mind.”

Mr. Lane reached forward to fold my hand back over the money.

“It costs nothing,”

he insisted.

Sarah grunted from behind her magazine.

“You don’t know that he’s dead,”

I snapped.

“Pardon?”

Sarah glared at me over the magazine cover.

“Riley might not be dead,”

I repeated.

“He’s just missing, and even if you’re right, you don’t have to be such a hag about it.”

Gladys and Mr. Lane shot each other a look of surprise while Sarah slowly lowered her magazine.

“So,”

she said coolly.

“there’s a bit of Ethel in there after all. Good. I thought maybe there’d been a mix-up at the hospital.”

My cheeks burned.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Sarah laughed, and while the sound was genuine, it wasn’t quite kind either.

“It’s a compliment. Your grandmother is a good woman. You could stand to be more like her.”

“Maybe you could too,”

I retorted.

“I don’t think she’d like to hear you talking about Riley the way you have been.”

“Please!”

Sarah guffawed.

“She knows he’s dead, even if she won’t admit it.”

“She sent me to print these—”

“She’s humoring poor Liam,”

Sarah said.

“No one who goes missing in Keel Watch is ever seen again, and life goes on. It’s sad, but it happens.”

The library air conditioning chose that moment to shut off, throwing an unsettling silence over the room.

“This has happened before?” I asked.

“Well, sure,”

Gladys interjected. She leaned over their shared stack of magazines to rifle through the titles until she found one she wanted.

“Every town has disappearances, but it’s more noticeable when it’s a small town like ours.”

“Like Margaret.”

Mr. Lane nodded.

“Like Margaret!”

Gladys agreed.

“She was always trouble,”

Sarah said.

Gladys glared at her friend, but continued.

“And Rusty and Hank Tracewell about fifteen years after that. They were brothers. That one hurt.”

“Not as much as Sophie and Henry Glass,”

Mr. Lane said.

“Glass?”

My heart dropped. That was Liam’s name.

“Liam got over his parents. He’ll get over his cousin too.”

Sarah shrugged.

“Where’d the magazine you just had go? I wanted that one.”

“Did he get over them?”

Gladys asked, helping Sarah to the discarded magazine.

“Or does he not want to listen to harpies like you tell him that he should?”

Sarah replied with another shrug and licked her finger before thumbing through the magazine pages.

“How old was Liam?”

I’d assumed just because he was friendly and mildly attractive, he must’ve had it easy, and I’d been such a dick. Worse than that, I’d been a dick to an orphan.

The flyers in the backpack felt heavier than before.

“I think Liam was in middle school?”

Mr. Lane guessed. Sarah shook her head.

“It was more recent than that. It was the same year Gladys was a ginger.”

Sarah gave Gladys’s gray hair a pat without looking up from her magazine.

“It wasn’t ginger, it was a warm chestnut.”

“It was an eyesore.”

“Anyway,”

Mr. Lane cut in.

“it wasn’t that long ago. Maybe a few years. Liam came home from school one day, and no one was waiting. We never figured out what happened.”

“But life goes on.”

Sarah dropped her magazine again to look at me from behind her giant glasses.

“We’re used to it by now. People go missing, we wait a little bit, we hold a memorial, and then we carry on. It doesn’t do anyone any good to linger on things we can’t fix.”

I clutched the backpack tighter. I had half a mind to repost the flyers against Gams and Mom’s wishes, just to prove Sarah wrong. Riley would come back. There was no need to be so cynical.

“Thanks for the posters, Mr. Lane,”

I clipped.

“I know Liam will appreciate it too.”

I made sure to glare at Sarah as I spun on my heel and bolted for the doors, moving fast enough that I wouldn’t hear whatever nasty thing she said next. The last time I’d wanted to spite someone as badly as I wanted to spite Sarah, I’d gotten Linsey’s Von Leer admission revoked.

I tossed my backpack into the front seat of the car, and Riley’s posters spilled out on the floor. They were still warm from the printer as I shoved them back into place, threw Gams’s car into drive, and started the journey north.

I didn’t have time to hang all of the new posters, but I managed to replace most of the ones I’d removed in the first town. Sarah had pissed me off just enough to disobey Gams and Mom, but what did they know either? I probably shouldn’t have listened to them in the first place. Riley deserved a chance to be found, and Liam deserved my help in finding him.

As for their fears about unwanted attention coming to Keel Watch Harbor? Surely the town’s reputation wasn’t worth the life of one of its own.

I returned to the shop well after closing. Gams raised an eyebrow from where she counted money at the register when I came in, and I scowled in response.

“Your friend Sarah sucks.”

I shuffled past her towards the stairs.

“Welcome to Keel Watch Harbor. You aren’t an official resident until Sarah’s offended you in some way.”

Dinner was the first normal meal we’d had together in the last few days, and I held my questions about Keel Watch Harbor’s sordid history of missing persons at bay. I must’ve been pulling at my eyelashes at some point because as I let Gams blather on about Von Leer and my upcoming phone interview, I found my fingertips grasping at empty space where I was certain eyelashes had been that morning. The black remnants of my mascara under my fingernails confirmed my suspicions.

“When is that again?”

Gams asked, gathering our salad bowls to take to the sink. If she had noticed the broken glassware in the trash from the night before, she didn’t say anything.

“The phone interview? Two weeks from yesterday. I’ll need that morning off.”

“Consider it done.”

She winked at me, then noticed the broken ceramic chicken on the windowsill. She picked it up to turn it over in her hand and inspect the crack.

“Shame. I really liked that one.”

She tutted and slipped it into her cardigan pocket.

“And if the interview goes well—”

“It will,”

Gams interrupted with a kind of ferocity that suggested she believed she could get me into Von Leer through sheer willpower.

“Right. When the interview goes well, I’m thinking about taking a long weekend next month to tour the campus.”

Gams lit up at the idea, which would’ve made me feel guilty about my ulterior motives to corner my biological father and interrogate him about Skalterra if it weren’t for her dragging me into her plot to sabotage the search for Riley.

“Just tell me when, and I’ll give you both a few days off.”

I faltered.

“Both?”

I repeated.

“You and Liam.”

No, that wouldn’t work for me.

“I don’t need Liam.”

My cheeks warmed at Gams’s ensuing laughter.

“No? Then who is going to show you around campus? How were you planning on getting there?”

“There’s a train—”

“Perfect. I’ll pay for both of your tickets and a hotel room.”

“Hotel room?”

I blanched.

“No, that’s not—”

“The train schedule isn’t day-trip friendly. Don’t worry, it’ll be a double room. And I won’t worry because I know Liam is a good boy and that you aren’t into those sorts of things.”

“But—”

“That poor thing needs the distraction, Wren. You’d be doing him a favor by taking him.”

I swung my backpack onto the small, two-person table that stood in the center of the kitchen. Riley’s remaining posters slipped from the open zipper and scattered across the linoleum.

“I’d be doing him a favor by actually helping him find his cousin, instead of actively working against him.”

Gams narrowed her eyes at me, pausing in her scrubbing of our dinner bowls.

“We’ve been over this. Riley is gone.”

“Right.”

I nodded.

“Just like Margaret, and the Tracewell brothers, and Liam’s parents.”

Gams’s face paled, and her neck bobbed with a nervous gulp. Then, she turned stony, any sign that I’d caught her off guard squashed.

“What’ve you been up to today, Wren Warrender?”

she demanded.

“I told you, nothing good comes from outsiders poking around Keel Watch Harbor, and that includes you.”

The word “outsider”

stung in an unexpected way, but I could sense Gams was running defense, which meant I held more power in this conversation than I had initially realized.

“I don’t need to poke around when your friends are giant gossips.”

“Sarah?”

Gams hissed.

“Gladys too.”

Gams grimaced.

“This isn’t some puzzle for you to solve. There’s no big conspiracy here.”

“No?”

I sang, fanning myself with the paper.

“Then why are you using me to cover up Riley’s disappearance?”

“I’m covering up nothing.”

“Then why—”

“Keel Watch is small, Wren. Smaller scandals than a missing boy have ruined towns like ours.”

Gams turned back to the dishes so I couldn’t see her face.

“And the Glass family has a complicated past. I’d go into it more, but quite frankly, their business is not mine to tell and it does you no good to be nosy. I’m keeping us from becoming a spectacle. I’m keeping Liam safe from people who would see him as a tragic story to gawk at and package up for their Real Crime podcasts.”

“It’s not ‘Real Crime’, it’s ‘True Crime’,”

I mumbled, trying to tame the sudden shame rising in my cheeks. Maybe I shouldn’t have reposted the flyers after all.

“And it should be Liam’s decision if he becomes a spectacle or not.”

“He’s young. He wouldn’t understand that I’m trying to protect him.”

“But Margaret and the Tracewell brothers, they disappeared too.”

“Years apart! Margaret was a sad story. We get a lot of people through town, and not all of them are well-intentioned. As for Rusty and Hank, they were avid fishermen. One day they sailed out, and they didn’t come back. It doesn’t take a detective to figure out what happened.”

I hated to admit that her words made sense, though there was still one important detail bothering me.

“Then how do you know Riley is gone for good?”

“Riley was a good boy.”

Gams stared into the sink, but her eyes were unfocused.

“If he were alive, he would’ve checked in by now. He’d never do this to his parents and Liam on purpose.”

She cleared her throat and turned back to look at me. Her magnified eyes glistened behind her glasses. I’d been so focused on fighting her that I had forgotten she would be just as upset by Riley’s appearance as anyone.

But it didn’t mean I wasn’t upset too.

“I don’t want to do this anymore,”

I said, gesturing at the scattered flyers.

“It doesn’t feel good, and it’s not fair.”

“You’re right”

Gams’s face softened, and she opened her arms in apology. I accepted the hug, reluctant at first, but then melted into her embrace as I always did.

“That wasn’t right of us to ask you to do this, and moving forward, you don’t have to help anymore.”

I nodded, my chin bumping against her head as I did.

“The fourteenth,”

I said. She pulled away from the hug.

“What?”

“That’s when I’d like to visit Von Leer. It’s a Thursday. I can have that day off, right?”

She grinned.

“Of course. You and Liam both.”