ng.”
Rather than answering Bex or the incoming call, Destiny thinks of how she’s never flunked an assignment in her entire life. Always top of her class, and despite being admitted to university as a twelve-year-old, Destiny cannot fathom this degree of failure.
She’s ticked nothing off the list, not even throwing away the plants whose shriveled corpses goad her, their untimely deaths undoubtedly due to the curtains constantly being drawn tight. That, and Destiny forgetting to water them.
The laptop’s ringing grates on Destiny’s nerves, but she can’t force herself to answer and face Dr. Shepherd’s disappointment. It will be carefully concealed, of course, with the psychiatrist gently pointing out there’s always next week, or the week after that, to achieve these seemingly simple goals. But it doesn’t matter how much of an extension Destiny is given.
It’s no use.
For how can she possibly cut ties with Bex, who’s her dearest, not to mention only, friend?
Plus, there’s no way the Council of Enigmatologists will take her back after she’s been AWOL for so long. Each time an envelope drops through the mail slot, Destiny fully expects it to be a letter informing her that they’ve revoked her membership. It hurts to remember how thrilled she was to be appointed president of the prestigious group just thirteen months ago, and how she, Bex, and Nate all splurged on a fancy dinner to celebrate.
When the call finally drops, Bex exhales, a long whoosh of defeat. “I know I shouldn’t enable you with all the talking, but it’s not like I can call anyone on your behalf.”
They both look down at the image on the home screen of Destiny’s laptop.
It’s a photo that was taken thirteen years ago when Destiny was eight. In it, her mother’s arm is flung across Annie’s shoulders, happiness radiating from the two best friends in waves. Destiny’s eyes fill with tears as she studies her mother’s straight black hair and pale skin, and those enormous glasses obscuring most of her face.
Jutting her chin at Liz, Bex murmurs, “I wish I’d known her.”
Destiny nods before turning her attention to Annie, with her striking Afro and beaded shoulder-duster earrings, and her smile as bright as the sun.
The image was captured two weeks before Liz died, and a year before the paperwork would go through to officially make Annie Destiny’s second adoptive mother. Their deaths were wrenching losses, tearings in the fabric of Destiny’s being that she never quite stitched back together.
There were times in the before when Destiny experienced the sting of loneliness, that awful yearning of the one forever stuck outside, nose and palms pressed against the cold glass, gazing in at what belonging looked like: foreheads bent together, raucous laughter elicited by inside jokes, sentences finished by those who knew you best.
But this is not loneliness, in the same way that a drop of water is not a deluge, the way a sigh is not a hurricane.
“I’m so sorry that you’re having such a rough time of it,” Bex says, reaching out to tuck a flaming red curl behind Destiny’s ear. She freezes upon seeing Destiny’s expression, her hand hovering like a ghost between them. “A year is a long time, though, and Dr. Shepherd is right despite the fact that she clearly has it in for me. You need to move on.”
God, that Bex is apologizing to her, of all people, when everything that happened was Destiny’s fault.
“No, I’m sorry,” Destiny says, her voice pulled so taut that it snaps. Seeing the pills all standing to attention—no longer a cemetery full of headstones, but rather an army ready to fight the last battle—Destiny reaches for the urn again, stroking it like a security blanket. “If you stop talking to me, Bex, I don’t know what I’ll do.”
“Not gonna happen,” Bex replies breezily. And then more firmly she says, “Okay, it’s tough love time. You seriously need to shower because you’re stinking up the place. Plus, the kitchen needs cleaning. Those take-out containers have grown thumbs. I swear I caught them trying to hitch a ride to the nearest primordial swamp.”
Destiny laughs at how incredibly bossy Bex is.
Especially for a dead person.
Still, it’s reassuring that no matter how much has changed, some things stay exactly the same.
CHAPTER 2Destiny
Sunday—10:15 a.m.
Destiny flinches at the unmistakable sound of the mail slot creaking open and a letter fluttering through. If she was waiting for a sign, then the arrival of a letter from the council would surely be it.
“Ignore it,” Bex pleads as Destiny pushes her laptop aside to get out of bed. “Who needs those losers anyway?”
Bex has never understood Destiny’s affinity for the council, but then why would she? Even before she died, Bex always managed to fit in. Near the end, when her eating disorder began devouring her whole, most people didn’t even notice because she constantly surrounded herself with similarly emaciated women in an industry that normalized her illness.
But until the council, Destiny never knew what it was like to have peers.
When other children her age were being invited to birthday parties, or endlessly obsessing over their first crushes, Destiny was attending lectures at Yale, not only thoroughly annoying her professors—who felt they were above babysitting duties—but also the other students, who saw her as a precocious pain in the ass whose presence made them all look bad.
Nerd. Geek. Dork. Dweeb. Freak. Brownnose. Boffin. Propeller-Head. Prodigy. Wonk.
They called her everything but her name, making Destiny feel like a lone pelican in a flamboyance of flamingos, so bumbling and awkward that she’d never fit in even if she doused herself with pink paint and walked on stilts.
But the day she got the council’s invitation, those hallowed hallways opening for her, Destiny found a squadron of other pelicans, with their shoulders hunched and giant beaks agape, devouring knowledge as hungrily and indiscriminately as she did. They welcomed her as a contemporary, someone to be consulted rather than avoided, allowing Destiny—for the very first time in her life—to embrace her very pelican-ness.
And now here she is, about to be booted out of the only club she’s ever cared about.
Shuffling to the front door, she spots a dove gray envelope that’s landed face up on the bamboo flooring, her name written across it in antiquated script. Destiny Whip. There’s no address or stamp, which Destiny thinks is strange until she remembers that it’s a Sunday, and that no postal workers will be delivering mail today.
She peers out through the peephole, spotting a cloak so black that it’s almost blue. It disappears into the elevator with a swoosh, a matador challenging a bull, before the doors ding closed.
A heaviness gathers and settles in Destiny’s stomach. Apparently, the council is so desperate to take her name off their letterheads that they’ve sent an emissary on the weekend. She wonders which one drew the short stick. Her money’s on poor Dodkins, a delightfully eccentric little man whose area of specialty is nineteenth-century puzzle boxes from the Hakone region of Japan.
Sighing, Destiny trudges back to bed. Her laptop rings again, Dr. Shepherd calling once more, but Destiny slams it closed, not wanting any witnesses to this humiliation.
Bex sits next to Destiny, ineffectually trying to fluff the pillows. “The envelope doesn’t have the pretentious wax seal, so it can’t be from the council. Maybe you’ve been nominated for another award,” she exclaims, ever the
optimist.
But no, that can’t be it. All of Destiny’s work correspondence occurs over email. Her inbox full of hundreds of unread emails can attest to that.
After slicing the envelope open with the lone jagged fingernail she hasn’t gnawed off yet, Destiny withdraws the page.
The original read through is confusing.
“Told you it would be something interesting,” Bex crows.
“But I’m not a historian,” Destiny replies, brow furrowed. “And I never applied for this position.”
“Hmm, weird,” Bex says, tapping her French manicure against her chin. “Have you ever heard of the Scruffmore family?”
Destiny mulls it over. “No.” The name is unusual enough that she’d remember it.
“Google them,” Bex instructs, her answer to everything.
Destiny opens her laptop again with a pang of guilt over Dr. Shepherd’s two missed calls. She makes a mental note to pay for the consultation and email an apology.
Googling the Scruffmore family gets zero hits. Same goes for Mordecai Scruffmore. Nor is there mention anywhere of the job listing. Eerie Island comes up as a vague blip on the map about thirty miles offshore from the town of Gwillumbury. While the ferry terminal is listed as being a three-hour train trip away, there isn’t any mention of the island’s castle or the Grimshaw Inn and Tavern. There are no pictures of the island at all, not even satellite images on Google Earth.
“What the hell?” Destiny mutters.
Her mind begins to fizz like it’s being carbonated. She welcomes the old familiar sensation, how alive it makes her feel. Doing a deeper dive, Destiny scrolls through dozens of search engine result pages before finally being rewarded with one grainy photograph of Mordecai Scruffmore. It’s listed, with no explanation beyond being captioned with his name, on a defunct website that was designed before Destiny was even born.
“Well. Isn’t he delightful?” Bex murmurs, studying all the star tattoos inked across Mordecai Scruffmore’s forehead.
While Destiny can believe some kind of administrative error resulted in the letter being sent to her, she can’t understand why there’s barely any mention of the Scruffmores or their island anywhere on the internet, especially not if the family is as prestigious as they claim.
Picking up the page, she reads it again, noting that today is the 27th of February, the day on which she’s meant to arrive. She wonders
if this is some kind of prank, but something about the letter niggles. As she studies it more closely, Destiny’s jaw drops when she spots the key to unlocking the hidden message. **1
* * *
Once the secret has revealed itself, Destiny’s hands begin to shake so violently that she puts the page down so she won’t rip it. This is the letter she’s been waiting her entire life for, the one she never dared believe would actually arrive. She feels lightheaded, sick with expectation.
The last time she felt this way was when she found the other letter, the one that arrived mere days before her mother’s death.
That one was signed: Yours, Kye.
Mordecai and Kye. Two mysterious letters, arriving thirteen years apart, signed with similar names.
That can’t be a coincidence, surely?
Destiny’s heartbeat stomps out a rapturous percussion of something she hasn’t felt in a long time. It takes her a moment to identify it as hope.
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