Page 7

But as I get closer, I can’t use that excuse. Not when the woman’s hair comes into view, the blonde waves cascading down either side of her face where she’s slumped forward on the bench.

I take a breath and open my mouth, though the first time I try to call out to her, no sound escapes.

Woman up, Sable, I tell myself silently. I remind myself that I work the night shift at a shitty motel. That I’ve had drunk men, petty criminals, and cheating spouses rip into me more times than I can count.

I’ve even been robbed at gun point. Though the guy hadn’t done a very good job of painting over the orange safety ring that identified the gun as a fake. Not that I was complaining, since getting held up had meant I got a few nights off after.

So I open my mouth again and clear my throat before I finally manage to call, “Hello?” The wind pulls at the sound, turning it thready and softer than I intend. So I call again, a little more loudly this time.

The woman doesn’t move. I call out again and take another step with my heart pounding against my ribs like a bass drum. Another step. Another call out. But finally I run out of steps to take when I’m standing right beside her, staring down at the woman.

“Oh,” I murmur when I realize, belatedly, that she’s unconscious. She is slumped forward, head on her chest, and I wonder how hard someone had to work to prop her up here so she wouldn’t fall into the railing or into the water entirely.

Glancing down, I notice a letter in her hand, with the name LILY printed on the front in a completely different handwriting than my letter had. Where mine had been big, print letters scrawled in a sloppy hand, the name on hers is curved and meticulous. I reach out, slowly and tentatively, but when the woman’s hand shoots out to grasp mine, I shriek.

She does too, her eyes flicking open to meet mine. My own shriek gets louder, and I jerk backward, falling to my ass on the pier as the ocean wind tears away both of our voices.

“W-what the hell?” The woman, Lily, jumps to her feet and spins around in a circle, eyes wide. “Where am I?! Who are you?” she rounds on me and I scramble to stand up quickly in case I need to defend myself.

“I’m Sable. I–I woke up here too,” I say quickly, trying to explain as quickly as I can so she doesn’t get the wrong idea. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know you were still out. I’ve been calling to you, and when I saw the letter in your hand–”

“Letter?” She doesn’t even realize she’s holding onto it, I realize, and point at her and that’s clenched around the envelope. Slowly she looks down, her face going pale when she reads her name on it. “What in God’s name…” Her voice trails off as she tears it open, shredding the edge of the envelope in her haste. I watch as she reads over it, and I watch again as her eyes go to the top of the letter to start over. This time she reads more slowly, like her brain is having as much trouble processing it as mine did.

When she looks at me again, the cold wind whipping her hair in front of her grey eyes, I quickly reach into my pocket to pull out my own envelope as proof that we’re on the same side.

“You got one too.” She takes it from me with shaking fingers and opens it up, comparing the two letters before handing it back to me.

“The handwriting is different, though. See?” I take a careful step towards her so I can hold out my envelope, comparing it to hers.

“Sable.” My name is quiet on Lily’s lips, and she looks at me searchingly. “We’ve never met, have we?”

I shake my head as I study her, making sure there’s nothing in her face that strikes me as familiar. If I had to guess, she’s younger than my twenty-six years, though not too much. She has to be in her early twenties, and even if she grew up here as well, I doubt we’re close enough in age to have gone to school together.

“I’m Lily. Obviously.” her mouth quirks in an unamused grin as she brandishes the envelope. When I shove my own back into the pocket of my hoodie, she does the same and crumples the envelope and letter up to put in the pocket of her puffy, slick jacket. I can’t help the thought that it’s not quite cold enough to be dressed like she’s going snowboarding, but I keep my mouth shut about it. “Do you know where we are?”

“What?” I blink, having stared off across the water for long enough that I’d become lost in thought. “Do I…? Yeah. I do, actually. Wonderlight Pier was uh, a pretty big attraction around here. I worked here for about four years.” Shoving my hands in my pockets to protect my chilly fingers from the window, I turn to look at her again. “You’re not from around here?”

She makes a noise of disagreement in her throat and shudders. “Not even close. I came up here for a funeral of a family friend. I live in Georgia.” Well, that certainly explains why she’s all bundled up. “Went to the funeral and then,” Her brows furrow and she glances out at the ocean again. “I don’t remember what happened after that. But I had to have been somewhere, right? The cemetery was nowhere near the ocean.”

Her words make me examine my own memory, trying to figure out if I’m remembering everything or missing any crucial information. I remember the old woman’s leering jack-o-lantern sweater. I remember how she stood behind Room 7 as he’d tried to throw his weight around. Her sympathetic glance, and–

Can you tell the guys in the red truck to turn down their music?

Joel’s face in the opening of his door, his body backlit by the flat screen that gets too much use when he’s here.

“There was a truck,” I murmur, half to Lily and half to myself. “I think it was–”

“Red?” Lily cuts in, and at my nod, she turns to press her hands on the flat surface of the railing over the ocean. “There was a red truck outside the funeral home. We never could figure out whose it was, but I don’t know the family that well. I just figured it was someone who couldn’t bring themselves to come in.”

“I couldn’t see the driver,” I admit as hazy memories slowly come creeping back in. “The windows were tinted.”

It takes us a few more minutes to work out that we’d both been drugged. While I can remember the feeling of the cloth over my nose, of how it had plugged up my nostrils like cotton and my lungs had burned when I’d dragged in air, Lily can’t quite remember that. Only a tall figure walking towards her, and a low voice murmuring in her ear.

“We can’t be the only ones here,” she says suddenly, dragging me out of the mire of my thoughts again. “How big is this place? Where do you think the electrified fence is?”

“It’s not huge, but it’s pretty long. It’ll take us twenty minutes or so to get back to the shore from all the way out here.” I hesitate, looking at the distant shore. “We could make our way back and check the buildings. And the state of…everything.” I really don’t want to find any other surprises here, but I’d rather discover them now than later.

“Do you think this is real?” The question is a whisper from Lily’s lips, and I turn to look at her, a chill going through me at another gust of ocean wind.