“I think they’re cute,” she said.
He gave her an unexpectedly mischievous glance. “I dare you to pet one.”
“I will if you catch one for me.”
Their eyes met. In natural light, his eyes looked more green than brown, and they had a sparkle in them she hadn’t seen before. Despite the mud and blood and sweat, she could see that there might be reasons he turned up on Most Eligible Bachelor lists other than being rich, famous, brilliant, and not completely hideous.
With a shriek and a plop, a bullfrog leaped out from under his feet and into the water.
“Ugh!” He backed away from the shore. “I don’t know what sort of books you’ve read, but if you ever read H. P. Lovecraft, you’d know those were clearly the inspiration for Cthulhu.”
As they continued their walk around the island, this time farther from the shore, she said, “I read Lovecraft when I was a kid. He’s boring and racist and it’s his fault I spent years thinking ‘gibbous’ meant ‘spooky.’ Every time something creepy appeared, the moon was gibbous. I only found out it actually meant ‘three-quarters full’ when I wrote an essay that said Halloween is the only gibbous holiday.”
He laughed. “I was reading Lovecraft right about the same time I learned that Bactrian camels have two humps. So I assumed ‘batrachian’ meant ‘like a two-humped camel.’”
Then it was her turn to laugh. “He called all his eldritch horrors batrachian, didn’t he? Kind of cuts down on the scare factor if you’re picturing a camel… Whatdoesbatrachian mean?”
“Frog-like,” he said triumphantly. “I only found out when I went to college and it was in a biology textbook. So yeah, Lovecraft has a lot to answer for, but he was completely right about bullfrogs.”
“They’re cute,” she said. “He was prejudiced.”
Funny, she thought. I’d never have imagined that Carter Howe and I would have read the same weird, outdated author when we were kids.
“Why were you reading Lovecraft?” Carter asked. “He’s so old-school.”
“My parents are old-school.” That was one way of phrasing it, and it wasn’t as if she was going to tell the truth about her family to Carter Howe of all people. “We only had classics in the house when I was growing up. What about you?”
“I loved pulp fiction when I was a kid. If it had a tentacle monster on the cover, I’d buy it.” He sounded bitter and self-loathing, as if he’d confessed to something both illegal and disgusting.
Fen had an unexpected moment of sympathy with him. Someone must have shamed him for his tastes too—his parents, probably—and he still carried that with him. “When I was a kid, I was obsessed withThe Babysitters Club. I used to buy them with my allowance and hide them under my bed.”
“Why’d you hide them?”
“Because my parents disapproved of trash books, as they called them.”
“That’s too bad,” said Carter. “People should let kids be kids. My parents never judged the books I read, no matter how trashy they were. I always appreciated that about them.”
As they walked on, she puzzled over that exchange. Had she spaced out and missed something he’d said that would make sense of why he’d seemed ashamed of reading pulp fiction one second and approving of it the next? Had she completely misread his tone? Either of those seemed completely plausible.
And so,she thought grimly,is the possibility that Carter Howe is inexplicable and weird. Reading trashy horror is deeply shameful! Reading trashy horror is absolutely fine! Cell phones just randomly explode! Bullfrogs are terrifying!
Because of the tall shrubs and small trees growing on the floating island, it was impossible to see from any given point how big it was. But when they pushed through a clump of bushes (Carter gave a moan of dismay as thorns ripped his coat, and Fen ground her teeth as berries squished against her jacket), they found an open, beach-like area that curved gently into the water.
And there, floating in the dark water and tied securely to a tree, was a boat.
Carter’s hand dropped to his hip as he jumped in front of her. “Get down!”
She ducked behind the nearest shrub and crouched on the quivering muddy ground, waiting for shouts and fighting and gunfire. But nothing happened. She peered through the bushes, and saw Carter prowling around, his muddy coat slapping at his ankles, scowling. No one else was in sight.
She stood up. “I don’t think it’s the kidnappers’ boat. I think we’ve found civilization!”
His scowl lifted. “God, I hope so.”
They hurried to the boat. It was small and brown, with paddles and no outboard motor. Fen, whose only boat experience had been with the Girl Scouts, couldn’t tell anything more about it. Presumably it was a fishing boat, and if they searched or waited long enough, the fishers would return and take them away from this godforsaken muddy—
And then she saw what was inside the boat. “What the actual fuck.”
“I knew this was too good to be true.”
