Nora finally looked at him. “What?”
“Yeah, look. I can’t find Virgo Bay on my GPS, but it looks like we can get to Nova Scotia from this ferry, right, which is only like an hour and a half from here. Then it’s a few hours on the boat and we’re there. I figure we can bug some locals fordirections once we get there. I bet it’s some little fishing village no one’s ever heard of except the towns nearby. Bet the seafood is straight fire.”
Charlie’s voice and enthusiasm were unchanged by everything that had just occurred. It was as if nothing out of the ordinary had taken place, as if Nora hadn’t just had to figure out how to save his life. His nonchalance was like ice water dumped onto Nora’s head. “You realize we just almost died, right?” she said. “You realizeyoujust almost died, right? You saw how close we came. That truck nearly plowed into your side of the car like it did with the highway barrier. You werethisclose to being scattered into a bunch of different parts all over the road. Do you get that?”
“Yeah,” said Charlie. “That would’ve blown. But hey, I’m not. So thanks for that.”
Nora put the car back in drive and started forward again. “Jesus Christ. Does anything ever faze you?”
“Does anything ever not faze you?” Charlie countered.
Nora ignored him. “There’s a ferry close by?”
“Yep.”
“Does your cause of death still say ‘car accident’?”
Charlie reached behind him to where his file sat just beside Jessica’s cage. He gave it a quick scan.
“Yep.”
Nora took a sharp inhale.
“Okay,” she said resolutely. “We’re going to Virgo Bay.”
7
The next ferry was set to depart an hour after the twins pulled up to the docks. Nora examined the awaiting ocean through narrowed eyes, as though squaring off with a high school bully. The wind had picked up, its blustery fingers pulling the water into choppy waves. She didn’t like any of it, and from the angry whitecaps foaming on the waves in the distance, it seemed the feeling was mutual.
Charlie trudged back to where Nora was leaning against her car by the dock, his hands full of to-go cups from the little café beside the ticket booth. He handed Nora her chamomile tea with honey and ripped a piece of doughnut from a paper bag held precariously between two fingers.
“You’re sure your file didn’t update again? Nothing about drowning or capsizing ferries or anything?” Nora said as Charlie plopped himself next to her on the bumper.
“Still just a plain old car accident,” said Charlie. He took another bite of doughnut and stared out at the sea. “Sure is pretty out there, huh?”
“It’s dark,” Nora said. “Nothing looks pretty in the dark.”
“Can’t see the stars if it’s not dark.”
“It’s too cloudy for stars.”
“Doughnut?” Charlie waggled the little paper-bag-swaddled pastry nub in Nora’s face.
Nora shook her head. The smell of salt and fish being dragged up from the sea by the growing winds turned her stomach. The prospect of a boat ride didn’t help matters much either. She never trusted boats. Humans weren’t meant to travel by water. They weren’t meant to travel by air either, for that matter, and roads were also pretty sketchy. No, to Nora, humans weren’t meant to travel at all, really. They were meant to stay safely tucked away in their beds eating soup. Maybe go for the odd walk through a familiar, well-lit park so their muscles wouldn’t atrophy.
She took a sip of her tea and promptly burned her tongue, which felt like an omen.
“I’m going to wait in the car.”
* * *
The ferry docked near a little coastal town lined with quaint Victorian storefronts, their quaint Victorian windows each framing a “closed” sign. It was only a little after nine p.m., but between the empty streets and the deep November darkness, it could have passed for midnight. This was almost definitely a bad idea. They had nowhere to stay and no idea where they were going. This was how you ended up being described in the past tense as “always lit up the room” in a crime documentary.
Nora drove around the commercial area of town twice before they finally noticed a single “open” sign, dimly glowing red and blue in the window of a twenty-four-hour diner called Mermaid’s Landing. The mermaids that landed here were definitely not theDisney kind, Nora decided. Three motorcycles sat parked out front of the run-down diner, its hand-painted sign so weatherworn that the blond mermaid logo looked more half-fish/half-constipated zombie than the sirens of myth. Nora parked.
“Want me to handle this?” Charlie asked, reading the concern on Nora’s face. “I’ve gotta go drop some kids off at the pool anyway.”
“Okay, gross. But no, it’s fine. We’ll go in together.”
