rending sadness rushed over me like a wave with no reason at all. I was lucky this time. I’d had warning and somewhere private to ride it out.
I dropped my bag on the bed and sat next to it. I pulled out my clothes, stacking them side by side on the bed to store later, and reached to the bottom of the bag, to the most important object I carried with me: a printout of a scanned photograph.
The phone call had come late at night, when I was leaving my shift at the burger place near my school, walking back to my foster home. It was short-term placement—three months left and I’d be out on my own, eighteen and done with high school. I never answered unknown numbers, but for some reason I picked up.
What do you know about Bitter Rock?
I was sure Abby had the wrong person. Or that it was some kind of prank. And then she texted the scan to me: a photo, front and back.
The photo showed my mother and me. I was maybe three. Small, but I always have been. I was pressed against her side, grinning up at her. I’d had brown hair as a kid; it had only lightened to blonde as a teenager. The same as hers, which was pulled back in a braid, the same way I wore mine now. A close-mouthed smile made her look like she had a secret and wanted you to know it. Her hands were in the pockets of a puffy vest; her gaze was fixed squarely on the camera. Behind her was the sky, and scrub grass, and a rocky cliffside. And in the corner of the photo was the edge of a sign. LANDON AVIAN RES—
That’s all you could read. There was a date scrawled on the back of the photo, next to our names. August 10, 2003. Days before she died. She looked happy. She looked well. She looked a world away from dying in a Montana hospital.
I lay down on the bed, holding the small wooden bird between my thumb and forefinger. Now that I’d seen one in person, there was no mistaking that it was a red-throated tern. A bird that only came from one island.
I knew a Sophie once, Mrs. Popova had said. Who else could she mean? I didn’t remember her. Did I? I shut my eyes and summoned up an image of Mrs. Popova’s face, and something kicked hard at my gut, the same not-quite-memory that I’d gotten looking at Mikhail.
Abby, the girl who called me, had told me about 2003, the summer when my mother, Martin Carreau, and Carolyn Baker went missing. Their deaths—or disappearances—were strange enough on their own, she said, but it wasn’t the first time it had happened.
She didn’t tell me more than that, so I found it on my own. The disappearances weren’t tied to Bitter Rock directly, not overtly, but you could make the connection if you knew what you were looking for. A small island. People missing. Investigations that petered out far too soon.
The Krachka first—a fishing boat. The crew missing and an entire village with it. An airbase in World War II abandoned without explanation. A back-to-the-land commune wiped off the map.
And three vanished ornithologists in 2003.
Abby wasn’t the first to put the pieces together and see the pattern. I’d found other theories—internet forums teemed with posts suggesting the missing were the victims of aliens, government experiments, the Rapture in miniature. And then the voices of reason always chimed in: coincidence. It was a dangerous part of the ocean. Lots of storms and lots of rocks. It was too remote for emergency services or search crews to get out there, increasing the chances of bodies going unrecovered. And, of course, some of it could be made up or exaggerated. It was the obvious explanation. The one that didn’t require you to believe in the impossible.
But I already believed in impossible things.
Because I was one of them.
EXHIBIT C
Video recording posted to Facebook by Angela Esau
POSTED OCTOBER 18, 2013, 9:43 AM
Caption reads: what a FREAK
The video is from a high angle, a phone lifted above the heads of a crowd of middle school students. They’re shouting, some of them laughing, most of it unintelligible or profane. They’ve formed a tight ring in a hallway lined with blue-gray lockers, and in the center of the ring, a girl is on her knees. She hunches, screaming and tearing at her wheat-colored hair, pulling