New Year Island (62 page)

The only gun they had was in Juan’s hands. What proof did she
really
have that he wasn’t the spy? It was even possible that he had grabbed Natalie himself, then brought her back to confuse them. And he had said something very odd to Camilla during the flag game.

He had mentioned Cory, the missing shipboard guest. When she asked if he thought Cory had jumped overboard he said, “
Maybe he had some help.
” At the time, it had vaguely reminded her of a story. With growing terror, she now realized that the story was “
The Most Dangerous Game.
”

She had seen Juan fight. JT had a knife and had clearly been trying to kill him. Even though Juan had the gun, he hadn’t even felt the need to draw it, subduing JT with a diver’s weight belt instead. Maybe she was blinded by her inability to think anything bad about someone who had risked his life to save a child.

JT had never come back. What if he and Juan had crossed paths again after she left Juan and returned to the houses? Where
was
JT? Had Juan killed him? Or was JT lurking outside right now, staring at their window, walkie-talkie in hand, speaking to Julian?

And Jordan—what if Camilla was wrong about her? Had her cheerful personality been an act all along? It hurt to believe that, but she could easily picture this new, cold-eyed version of Jordan side by side with Julian, hosting another of these terrible games together.

Brent and Mason were in the room with Camilla, seemingly lost in their own thoughts. They seemed oblivious of her inner struggle. Could one of them be faking it—watching her secretly from beneath half-closed eyes?

Or even both of them? What if Julian had more than one spy?

Dmitry would seem to be the only one she could trust for sure, but earlier, she had heard him admit that he was new to the shark research team. Could he be a Vita Brevis plant?

Even without the modafinil she had taken, there was no risk of her falling asleep.

They would see Julian tomorrow.

Pushing aside the space blanket, she rose and walked through the doorway into Heather’s empty room.

There was something she had to do.

K
neeling on Heather’s cot, all alone in an empty room lit by a single flickering candle, Camilla took out her iPhone. Watching the dark doorways, she thought about little Avery, waiting for her to come see him. Like she had
promised
.

Right after he said he wished he was dead.

She pressed the power switch on her phone. The battery indicator showed only a narrow sliver of red—she had a few minutes left at most. No signal, but she hadn’t expected any. Brushing her hair away from her forehead, she took a moment to compose her face and held the phone out in front of her. She activated the camera app, centered her candlelit live image on the small screen, and pressed the record button.

“Anyone finding this phone, please make sure this message gets to Briana Kent. Her contact info is in the phone’s address book.

“Briana, if you are listening to this, it means that I’m… I didn’t… It means you need to take charge of the foundation. I’m counting on you, and so are the kids. With this message, I’m leaving you whatever money I have. I know it’s not much, but it’s enough to pay yourself a salary and cover expenses. Please tell Avery I didn’t…”

She had to look away. Gaze roaming the ceiling, she fought to control her face. She took a deep breath and looked into the phone again.

“Tell him I didn’t abandon him,” she said. “Tell him I would have done anything to get back. I tried, Avery. I tried
so
hard
—”

Unable to continue, she tucked her chin into her shoulder and stared at the floor, pressing her other wrist against her nose and mouth. She lowered the phone and pushed Stop.

Angrily, Camilla erased what she had recorded. Holding up the phone at arms-length, she pushed the button again.

“Anyone finding this, make sure it gets to Euclid House and someone plays it for Avery Sanger, seven years old.”

She forced a smile onto her face. Made her voice sound cheerful.

“Avery, I really wanted to be there with you. If there had been any way I could, I would have. But something bad happened, and I couldn’t come. You already know life isn’t always fair to us. People get taken away from us sometimes, and it’s not our fault. When it happens, it’s okay to be sad for a little while. But you can’t stop trusting everyone. You can’t give up hope—”

The battery indicator blinked three times.

The phone went dead in her hand.

S
ensing someone standing in the doorway of the blockhouse, Juan looked up from the map spread on the table in front of him. Seeing who it was, he relaxed and slid his fingers forward, pushing the Glock out of sight beneath the map again. He put down the pen he held in his other hand.

Natalie stood at the side of the door frame, watching him.

Juan returned his attention to the map, and she came into the room with shy, hesitant steps to stand alongside him. He pointed at the pen marks he had made at different spots along the shoreline.

“The cave where I found you,” he said. “It might not be the only one.”

But Natalie was not interested in conversation, it seemed. She raised her arms and draped them around his neck, molding her body against him and raising her face to his.

Juan broke the kiss and shook his head. “I don’t think—”

Natalie clung to him, her mouth soft on his neck, his ear. He took a step back, bumping the edge of the cot with his calves. Placing her hands on his shoulders, Natalie pushed him back onto the cot. She stood in front of him, and her eyes held his, dark and serious, as she slowly pulled down the zipper of her jeans.

Juan remembered what Veronica had said about Natalie’s history. She was probably trying to express her gratitude, thanking him in the only way she knew how.

He shook his head again. “This isn’t a good idea.” He reached for her wrists but she stepped backward, reaching behind her to lean against the table.

Natalie wriggled her hips, and the jeans slid a couple of inches lower.

Juan kept his eyes on her face, refusing to look down but unable to avoid noticing the stark whiteness of skin in the open V of her zipper.

“No, Natalie.” He kept his voice gentle.

Unsmiling, unblinking, she held his gaze for several seconds.

It suddenly occurred to him what the past half minute would look like to Jordan, played on the monitors for everyone to watch, perhaps even interspersed with footage of him and Jordan making love.

What could she possibly think of him
then
?

Juan closed his eyes and lowered his head. Unable to speak, he waved Natalie away.

He listened as she rezipped her jeans, slid away from the table, and backed toward the door. Then he looked up.

Standing in the doorway again, she watched him with no discernible expression on her face. And then she was gone.

He stared after her, realizing with a sinking feeling that he had allowed himself to get distracted. He had let his guard down.

He reached under the map for the Glock, and his fingers brushed across empty tabletop.

The gun was gone.

Thursday: December 27, 2012

T
he storm had broken a few hours before dawn. Camilla was surprised that she felt alert, without the brittle, spacey feeling she remembered from college all-nighters. Standing outside the dripping walls of the station building, she looked around in the dim gray early-morning light.

Mason stepped out to join her, looking oddly cheerful. She glanced at the shattered lens of his glasses, at the cuts and bruises on his chin, and touched her own broken nose. They had to get ready; Julian could arrive anytime.

Would he come by boat? By helicopter? How many others was he bringing? Had people
paid
for the privilege of hunting Camilla and her fellow contestants? The thought sickened her, and it made her angry, too.

“Let’s go up by the tower,” she said. “I want to see if we can spot Jordan anywhere.”

“Did Julian look South American to you?” Mason asked, walking beside her. “Like, maybe, Colombian?”

She shook her head. She was no expert, but Julian’s features told her he maybe had some French or Italian ancestry.

“No,” she said. “But last night I realized there is something else we all have in common, besides being survivors. I think it’s significant.”

“All of us were dumb enough to let ourselves be marooned in a place we didn’t know in the middle of the night?”

Exasperated, she rolled her eyes at him. She just couldn’t see him being Julian’s spy.

“Normally,” she said, “reality shows pull their contestants from all over the country, don’t they? The diversity tends to make it more interesting—you root for your hometown heroes and all that. But everybody here is from California.”

“I’m from New York.”

“You’re from California
now
.”

“That’s actually quite interesting,” he said. “It means the candidate selection process couldn’t have been this big, anonymous nationwide search Julian indicated it was.”

She nodded. “Could there be some other connection between all of us? None of us seem to know each other, but Julian got hold of our names
somehow
. And he knew enough about each of us and our stories to get him interested in digging further.”

“News,” Mason said. “If I was looking for proven survivors, that’s where I’d start. California news stories. Lauren’s accident would have been in the news. Your Loma Prieta earthquake, obviously. Veronica’s first husband would have made the news, although it wouldn’t have been a big story. Same with Juan, because there’s no way the Coast Guard uncovered his identity.”

She nodded. “‘Billionaire Drug Lord’s Sons Kill Each Other at California Resort Island’? Juan would have been an absolutely
huge
news story if they knew who he was. They never found out. JT would have also been in the news—local Marine in helicopter crash. But what about you?”

He frowned. “My name did appear in some articles, but who would look for survivors in the financial news? And then there’s Natalie. Sad to say, but child abuse isn’t really newsworthy.”

“What about police reports, though?” Camilla brightened with excitement, but then her enthusiasm faded. “No, that doesn’t really work, either. Brent’s cancer was hardly a police matter. Or your SEC and IRS shenanigans.”

“IRS…?”

“I know you, Mason.”

“Okay, fine, but Jordan wouldn’t have shown up in news or police reports, either. How did Julian find her? Based on his profile, she’s easy to dismiss as a rich-kid overachiever with a short romantic attention span—”

Camilla grabbed Mason’s wrist in shock.

At the top of the hill above them, a meaty dark lump had been spiked atop a red-stained pole.

“Oh god…” She covered her mouth.

From the top of the seven-foot pole, the head of an elephant seal stared back at her with eyes like dull marbles. The severed head was as big as a rhino’s—clearly an alpha bull, one of the five-thousand-pound monsters that ruled the beach below. A zigzag scar marred the hide beneath the right eye, and a pale patch stood out on its rubbery trunk of a nose.

Camilla stared at it in horror. Jordan had done this. The woman she had once wanted to call her friend was having some kind of breakdown. Why else would she take such a risk, challenging a dangerous animal alone and in the dark for no reason at all? What kind of mental state was she in, to do a thing like that?

It wasn’t right for Jordan to be abandoned and alone now.

Camilla felt a wave of sorrow wash over her.

“Jordan’s totally lost it,” she said. “We have to find her and help her. Something’s happened to her mind. When we get back, she’ll need counseling. Professional care.”

“This head is for the beast.” Mason chuckled. “It’s a gift.”

“Not funny, Mason. Not now.”

“You’ve got this all wrong,” he said, pointing at the grisly banner. “Jordan’s telling us something here. Trust a Stanford communications major to do it with a literary reference.”

“Mason, please. Julian’s coming and we don’t have a lot of time.”

“I’m disappointed in you. It won the Nobel Prize for literature, and you haven’t read it?”

“What’s she telling us?”

“
Lord of the Flies,
” he said. “Maybe there is a beast… Maybe it’s only us.”

“M
ore caves is logical.” Dmitry stood next to Juan in front of the table in the blockhouse, looking down at the map. “Because of faults—lots of faulting in this part of coast.”

“Show me.” Juan handed him the pen.

Dmitry tapped the table at a spot beyond the eastern edge of the map. “San Andreas Fault.” With the back of the pen he traced a long course. “Big 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, caused by San Andreas Fault.”

He drew a line on the map, along the mainland near the coast, which cut past Año Nuevo Point. “San Gregorio Fault, part of Alquist-Priolo Earthquake Fault Zone. Branches off San Andreas Fault up in north, runs down to here.”

Moving his pen closer to Año Nuevo Point, he added another, shorter line, connecting to the first. “Año Nuevo Creek Fault.”

Closer to the point and the channel that separated it from the island, he added yet another. “Frijoles Fault.”

Two more, each shorter and closer to the channel than the last. “Green Oaks Fault. Año Nuevo Thrust Fault.”

Dmitry added another fault line, which ran through the channel separating the island from the mainland. “At least one fault in middle of channel. Probably more, here under island, also.”

He tapped the island with his pen.

“That’s why finding cave is not surprising. Probably lots of cave under island. When Coast Guard built lighthouse hundred forty years ago, they block some cave with cement to keep water out, control erosion.”

Juan thought about it, but he couldn’t concentrate. Jordan’s rolling travel bag was still next to her cot. Why had he let her go? He should have gone after her. He pictured Jordan’s beautiful expressive face, her myriad expressions: Jordan happy. Jordan thoughtful. Jordan serious. Jordan moving above him, looking at him with a half frown of concern on her face. Jordan in the throes of ecstasy, eyes open and vulnerable, sharing herself completely with him.