A Sea of Unspoken Things: A Novel

by Adrienne Young

Genres: Ghost; Supernatural suspense; Historical Fantasy

Synopsis

In this captivating atmospheric novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Unmaking of June Farrow, a woman investigates her twin brother’s mysterious death while confronting the ghosts of her own haunted past.

James and Johnny Golden were once inseparable. For as long as she can remember, James shared an almost supernatural connection with her twin brother, Johnny, that went beyond intuition—she could feel what he was feeling. So, when Johnny is killed in a tragic accident, James knows before her phone even rings that her brother is gone and that she’s alone—truly alone—for the first time in her life.

When James arrives in the secluded town of Six Rivers, California, to settle her brother’s affairs, she’s forced to revisit the ominous events of their shared past and finally face Micah, the only other person who knows their secrets—and the only man she has ever loved.

But as James delves deeper into Johnny’s world, she realizes that their unique connection hasn’t completely vanished. The more she immerses herself in his life, the more questions she has about the brother she thought she knew. Johnny was hiding something, and he’s not the only one. The deeper she digs, the more she is compelled to unravel the truth behind the days leading up to Johnny’s death. Ultimately, James must decide which truths should come to light, and which are better left buried forever.

 

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Release date: January 7, 2025

Publisher: Dell

Print pages: 277

Sample

ONE

We were made in the dark. I used to hate it when Johnny said that, but now I know it’s true.

Sunlight flickered on the windshield as I turned the wheel and the road curved, tightening. Trees pressed in like a wall on both sides of the cracked asphalt, making the old highway that snaked through the Six Rivers National Forest look impossibly narrower. I could feel that cinching in my lungs, too, the air squeezing from them just a little more the deeper into the forest I drove. I’d expected that.

From above, the little blue car would look like an insect between the giant, towering redwoods, and even just imagining it made me uneasy. I’d never liked the feeling that I couldn’t see into the distance, like the whole world might have ended on the other side of those trees and I wouldn’t know it. I guess, really, it had.

There was no world without Johnny.

The thought made the ache rising in my throat travel down my arms, into the fingers that curled around the smooth leather of the steering wheel. It had been three and a half months since I got the call that my brother was gone, but I’d known at least a day before that. The part of me that wasn’t constructed of bone and blood had just…known. Maybe even down to the minute.

I glanced at the duffel bag on the passenger seat, the only luggage I’d brought for the two weeks I’d be in Six Rivers. I couldn’t remember now what I’d even packed. In fact, I hadn’t even been able to think of what I might need. In the twenty years since I’d seen the tiny, claustrophobic logging town, I’d done my best to forget it. I’d avoided these winding mountain roads, using every excuse I could think of to keep from coming back to this place. But there was no denying that leaving Six Rivers and never looking back had come at a cost.

Only days after I turned eighteen, I left and never returned. I’d spent my youth hidden in the labyrinth-like forest before I’d all but clawed my way out into the light. Now, my life in San Francisco was exactly what I’d made it, as if I’d painted it onto a canvas and conjured it to life. The days that made up that version of me were filled with gallery openings, poetry readings, and cocktail hours—things that made me forget the sun-starved, evergreen-scented life I’d left behind.

But that cost—the unexpected conditions for that disentanglement—wasn’t just the home I knew or the memories I’d made there. In the end, the price I’d paid had been giving up Johnny. There was a time when I thought we could never truly be separated, because we weren’t just siblings. We were twins. For half of my life, there was nowhere I existed without him, and it didn’t feel like we were knit together by only blood and genetics. We were connected in places that no one could see, in ways that I still didn’t understand.

There had always been a kind of blur that existed between us. The anecdotal stories about twins portrayed on viral social media posts and afternoon talk shows weren’t just entertaining tales that skirted the line of the supernatural. For me, they’d always been real. Sometimes, terrifyingly so.

It wasn’t until I left that I felt some semblance of separation from Johnny. In a way, it felt like he had slowly been scraped from the cracks of my life, just like Six Rivers. In the beginning, he would make the trip down to the city on visits that were hardly ever planned. I would come home to find him cooking in my kitchen or standing fully clothed in the shower with a wrench to tighten the dripping faucet. He would just appear out of nowhere before vanishing like a ghost, and he never stayed long. He was a creature of quiet, unnerved by the buzz of the city and the twinkling lights it cast on the bay. The visits became less and less frequent, and he hadn’t shown up like that in years now.

Johnny wasn’t one for phone calls or emails. Half the time, he didn’t even respond to text messages. So, my only window into his quiet life in Northern California was the Instagram account he kept updated. From 349

miles away, the bits I got to see of my brother’s existence in the redwoods were through the lens of the old analog camera we’d found sitting on top of a neighbor’s garbage can when we were sixteen years old. Twenty years later, he had still refused to switch to digital, and after he started the Instagram account, it soon became filled with those little bits of the world that only Johnny seemed to notice. Sunlight gleaming on dewdrops. A swath of lace-like frost clinging to a pane of glass. The owls.

Always, the owls.

Even when we were kids, I knew that Johnny was different. He’d always found comfort in places that most deemed lonely, disappearing for hours without a word, and I would feel him go quiet. That stillness would settle right between my ribs, and when I couldn’t stand it anymore, I’d go and find him lying on the hot roof of our cabin or tangled high in the branches of a sixty-foot tree. He’d been pulling away from the world for as long as I could remember, but when the photographs of the owls started popping up on his feed, I remember the cold sensation that filled me. He was drawn to them—the secretive creatures that only came out in the darkness. And deep down I knew that it was because he was one of them.

If you’d have told me when we were kids that Johnny would end up a photographer, I probably would have thought it was both surprising and not at all. Growing up, I was the artist. My hands itched for pencils and paintbrushes the way Johnny’s mind itched for the quiet. In the end, both Johnny and I wound up trying to capture moments and people and places. Me with my canvas, him with his camera. But eventually, the drawings that filled my notebooks felt like the blueprints of a prison—a way for me to plan my escape. And eventually, I did.

Johnny had spent the last two years working remotely for a conservation project documenting five different owls in and around Six Rivers National Forest. The opportunity had seemed so serendipitous that I should have known there was something wrong with it. Johnny had never been lucky. Stars didn’t align for him and opportunities didn’t just drop into his lap. So, when I heard that Quinn Fraser, director of biology at California Academy of Sciences, was looking for someone to cover the Six Rivers area, it should have felt off. But only two weeks after I’d sent Johnny’s work to Quinn, Johnny was hired.

I hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that in a way, that made all of this my fault. The project was the first job Johnny ever had that wasn’t logging, and at the time I’d thought that maybe, finally, it would be the thing that got him out of Six Rivers. But only weeks away from 

the study’s end, Johnny was out on a shoot in Trentham Gorge when a rogue bullet from a hunter’s gun slammed into his chest.

My fingers slipped from the steering wheel, instinctively finding the place two and a half inches below my collarbone, where I could still feel it. I rubbed at the phantom ache, pressing the heel of my hand there until the throb began to recede.

The image unfurled, replacing the view of the forest outside the windshield. In my mind’s eye, tree limbs bent and swayed, creating blurred shapes of light that punched through the forest canopy high above—a flashing glimpse of the last thing Johnny had seen as he lay there on the forest floor. The rendering had been cast across my mind on a loop, making the connection between me and my brother more than just a sense or a feeling. Now, it was something that felt tangible and tactile. Now, it was too real.

Accidental firearm deaths weren’t unheard of in the wilderness that surrounded Six Rivers, especially during the elk season that brought hunters from all over the country to town. I could remember more than one that happened when me and Johnny were kids. But I also knew that accidents didn’t happen in that forest. Not really. There was almost nothing that was random or by chance because the place was alive—intentional.

It was that feeling that had compelled me to pack my bag and drive to Six Rivers. It had rooted down into my gut, twisting so tightly that it made it almost impossible to breathe. Because the link between me and Johnny wasn’t just intuition or some cosmic connection. I’d felt the white-hot heat of that bullet pierce between my ribs. I’d seen the forest canopy swaying in the wind. I’d also felt that bone-deep sense that had been coursing through Johnny’s veins. That despite what the investigation had uncovered about what Johnny was doing out in the gorge that day, he wasn’t alone. More than that, he was afraid.

I returned my hand to the steering wheel, watching the blur of emerald green fly past the window. I’d grown up feeling like the trees had eyes, each tangle of roots like a brain that held memories. I could feel, even now, that they remembered me.

I read once, years after I left, that they could actually speak to one another. That they had the ability to communicate through the network of fungi in the ground over miles and miles of forest. And I believed it. They knew what happened the day my brother died. They’d watched as he grew cold, his blood soaking the earth. And that wasn’t all they knew.

I forced my gaze back to the road and let my foot come down on the brake as the sign

appeared in the distance.

Six Rivers, California

4.5 Miles

A reflective white arrow pointed in the direction of the hidden turnoff on the only sign I’d seen in the last half hour. The blinker clicked on, and I let the car drift onto the gravel track that disappeared into the trees. Almost immediately, the silence grew thick in that way I remembered, making my ears feel like they needed to pop. It was an eerie absence of sound that resonated around the car, broken only by the crack of rocks under the tires.

The light had changed, too, adding to the stillness. The canopy far above diffused the sun into nothing more than glowing, golden air that hovered, suspended between the trees. The whole scene gave the innate feeling that you were leaving the world behind, entering into some imaginary place that didn’t really exist. I wished that were true.

The blue dot blinking on the dash’s GPS crept along the hairpin-turn road, deeper and deeper into the sea of green that covered the screen. The national forest was almost completely uninhabited by people except for the town that lay at its center. The map took me around turn after turn until the trees began to spread out just enough to reveal a house here and there. They were almost camouflaged against the colors of the landscape, with moss-covered roofs and wood-plank siding that was dotted with pine knots. The little red pin on the map crept closer until the cabin finally came into view.

The car rolled to a stop and I went stiff in my seat, eyes pinned to the old blue 4Runner parked out front. A nauseous, liquid feeling pooled in my belly as I shifted the gear into park. The cabin we’d grown up in was tiny, with two square windows that looked out at the road and a screen door that had once been painted a rust red. Pine needles that looked at least a foot deep were piled up around the porch like drifts of snow. As soon as I opened the car door, I could smell them.

My stomach turned a little as I let my eyes drift to the next house up the road. Set back in the trees, at the end of a long blacktop drive, was the Walkers’ place. The windows were dark, the drive empty, but it still looked lived in. Looking at it almost made me feel like I was right back there again—eighteen years old and no idea that everything was about to change.

I forced my gaze back to our cabin, but it took a few seconds for my foot to lift and touch down on the ground. It took much longer for me to actually get out. Almost immediately, I could feel my brother spilling from inside the walls of the house we grew up in, thickening in the air around me.

“I’m here, Johnny,” 

I breathed.

My hand clenched painfully around my keys as I rounded the car and got my bag, slinging it over my shoulder. My reflection moved over the windows of the 4Runner, and flashes of my younger self were there, behind the glass. Riding in the passenger seat with Johnny driving and Micah in the back. Flying down the highway sipping a lukewarm soda with music blaring from the only speaker that wasn’t busted. I could see my bare feet propped up on the dash and catch the scent of burning oil leaking through the air vents.

I stepped up onto the porch, eyeing a fluttering square of white behind the screen door where something was taped to the window. I pulled the handle, and the springs creaked and popped as the door opened. It was a folded piece of paper with my name written on the front.

I opened it, reading the handwritten script.

James, welcome home. Please come by the office when you get a chance.

—Amelia Travis

My spine straightened when I saw the name. Amelia Travis was one of the rangers stationed in the national forest, a replacement for the decades-long tenure of Timothy Branson, who’d had the position in our town when I was growing up. The purview of the ranger who occupied the U.S. National Forest office mostly entailed things like permits and protections and land management. But they were also the closest thing we’d had to law enforcement, which meant that Johnny’s death ultimately had fallen into Amelia Travis’s jurisdiction.

She’d been the one to call me that day. I could still clearly remember the nothingness that had seized my body as the woman’s words buzzed against my ear. Like every inch of empty space in the universe had hollowed me out. It was still there, a chasm that had no end, no edges.

I refolded the paper and lifted the mat, finding the rusted key that had been kept there for decades. It took a few tries to turn it in the lock, and I had to shove my shoulder into the door to get it open. But when it did, that chasm within me stretched so wide the whole earth could fall into it.

The presence that had hovered around the cabin was so heavy on the other side of the door that it knocked the wind from my lungs. My brother was like a gathering smoke in the air, choking out the oxygen. Like 

at any second, I’d hear him call my name from the other room.

James?

His voice echoed inside of me and I pinched my eyes closed, trying to push the overwhelming feeling down. I’d waited for that tether between me and Johnny to dim after I got the news that he was gone. I was sure that at some point, it would grow thin as he pulled away from this world. But the hope I’d held on to that I would walk through that door and finally begin to sense his absence was a point of fading light now. He was still here. He was still everywhere.

Growing up, my connection with Johnny was something that had always just existed, like the color of the sunlight when it came through the kitchen window or the familiar sounds of the forest at night. When I left home for the city, I finally experienced what it was like for that connection between us to stretch. He was still there—always there—and I didn’t realize how grafted into me it was until there were miles between us. But long before that, I’d begun to recognize when that feeling settled into my gut, telling me that something was wrong. I’d learned the hard way to listen when that happened.

For months before he died, I’d had the nagging sense that something was going on with Johnny. He was harder to get ahold of than usual. Less responsive to my texts. When I tried to press, tugging at the thread of that unsettled instinct, he’d pulled away even farther. Maybe farther than he’d ever been from me. But then he was gone, and now I was convinced that all of it had been some kind of premonition of what was coming.

When I opened my eyes again, the saturated colors of the space came into focus, painting a scene that made my heart come up into my throat. The navy checkered sofa and corduroy armchair were still set neatly on a fraying Turkish rug that half covered the scratched wooden floor. The fireplace was stacked with large, misshapen stones, and a shelf on one wall was filled with dozens of books. One corner of the rectangular room was carved out as a small kitchen with an old green stove and a window that looked out into the forest. Even the mismatched pottery dishes on the shelves had a humble charm to them, glazed in shades of brown and cream.

I let my hand slide over the tops of the books, reading their spines. With just Johnny, me, and Dad living here, the place had always been distinctly masculine in a way that hadn’t changed at all. Every detail was the same, as if it hadn’t been years since I’d left. As if I’d walked out that door only days ago.

We were seventeen when Dad took a temporary logging job up in Oregon that turned out to be mostly permanent, and our mother had left long before that, extricating herself from the hungry forest after years of being trapped here. Pregnant only three months after high school

graduation, she’d married our father for no other reason than the fact that that’s what you did. He got a job with the logging company, and she gave birth to not one but two babies. She named us James and Johnny, and I couldn’t help but wonder if that’s because she wished we’d both been boys. Like maybe she could somehow spare me her own fate if I wasn’t a girl.

Only a few years later, she was gone. If I had any memories of the woman, they were folded so deep in my mind that they couldn’t be summoned, and the ones I did have of my father were like faded pictures that blurred at the edges. It was this place I remembered most. The cabin, and Johnny. But my mother’s story had been a kind of cautionary tale for me as a kid. One that haunted me through adolescence, all the way up to the day I left. I’d spent all those years trying not to become her, but when I got on that bus to San Francisco, it wasn’t just to dig myself out of the hole my mother had trapped herself in. I was running from more than that.

An engine rumbled outside, growing loud before it was interrupted by the screech of brakes. Through the window, I could see the red truck pulling into the dirt drive, and even from this distance, with only the shape of his shadowed profile visible, I recognized him.

Micah Rhodes.

I let the duffel slide from my shoulder and hit the ground by my feet as I took a step closer to the window. Instantly, I started counting the years since the last time I’d laid eyes on him, but I already knew the answer: twenty. It had been twenty years, and somehow, I could still feel that rush of blood beneath my skin.

Smoke, the wolflike dog that had shown up on our doorstep when Johnny and I were teenagers, was in the cab beside him, and at first glance, a shiver snaked up between my shoulder blades. The dog should have died years ago, but he looked exactly the same. Just like the cabin. As if he was part of the immortal landscape that was this life.

The engine cut off, and for nearly a minute Micah just sat there. I could already see his nerves, and something about that made me feel just a little less crazy. I wasn’t the only one dreading this moment. I’d hoped there was a way to avoid it altogether, but for all its miles of trees and trails and ravines, Six Rivers was much too small for that.

He raked a hand through his hair before he got out, and when I could finally see his face properly, my stomach dropped just a little more. His denim-blue button-up was opened over an old T-shirt, his jeans faded. This was a version of him that was achingly familiar, always a bit thrown together, everything about him worn in and frayed.

His not quite blond, not quite brown hair had been the same shade since we were kids, but it was much longer now. It waved at the ends where he had it tucked behind his ears, and the scruff along his jaw was the same color. His face was different, less youthful than it had been all those years ago, of course. But the light in his eyes had changed, too. There was less light in them now.

Smoke was whining the moment he jumped out of the truck, pacing the drive with his sharp, tawny eyes on the cabin. His ears were back, his head ducked low, like he could feel it, too—Johnny. He was tall enough that the tips of his ears reached my waist, ...