Awaken

spec house on Reef Key — and slapped it onto the kitchen counter. A photo slid out … a photo of my mom with my uncle Chris — both of them looking years younger, twenty years younger at least — and someone who could only be Seth Rector’s father.

When my mother saw the photograph, the color drained from her face. She reached out quickly to snatch it away, but Alex was too fast for her.

“No,” he said, his hand landing over it. “Let Pierce see. She has the right to know.”

“Know what?” I asked, moving towards the counter.

“Pierce,” Mom said. She looked as if she were going to be sick. “I can explain ….”

“I’m interested to hear that explanation,” Alex said. “I’m sure Pierce and John will be, too.” He passed the photo to me.

In the picture, my mom, Uncle Chris, and Mr. Rector were in swimsuits, standing on a sandy beach in front of some mangroves, the bushy kind of tropical tree my mom had always said roseate spoonbills liked to nest in. The three of them were laughing and holding something up for the camera as they mugged for the lens. The things they were holding were yellowish and long, and appeared to have been pulled from the sand. I could see the holes — not very large or very shallow — on the beach behind them, along with a lot of seaweed and driftwood.

There were more things like the ones they were holding sticking up out of the sand all around them. There were also more than a few empty beer bottles, and even an overturned bottle of Captain Rob’s Rum.

“That’s Reef Key, isn’t it?” Alex asked. “Before Mr. Rector and Farah’s dad developed it? Is Farah’s dad the person taking the picture?”

“Yes,” Mom said in a faint voice.

That’s when I took a closer look at what she and Uncle Chris and Mr. Rector were holding up as they laughed into the camera, and finally realized what they were: bones.

Not fish bones, or animal bones.

Human bones.

22

They built their city over those dead bones …

DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto XX

Mom,” I said, confused, squinting down at the photo. “I don’t understand. Why are you holding up fake bones and laughing? Was it Halloween? Were you guys pretending to be pirates?”

John took the photo away from me.

“Those are not fake,” he said. He put the photo back in the file Alex had laid across the counter and closed the cover.

I glanced from John to my mother. John’s expression was grim. My mother’s was mortified.

I was starting to feel mortified, too, now that I understood.

“We were so young,” Mom murmured.

“You looked like you were my age when that was taken,” I said.

I didn’t mean to sound judgmental. It’s just that no matter how old I was, I don’t think I would ever have picked up real human remains and waved them around, laughing, in front of a camera.

I couldn’t meet John’s gaze. His skeleton could easily have been one of those on that beach, if his body hadn’t ended up in the Underworld instead. The idea of anyone picking up his remains while drunk on a beach and waving them around was causing my blood to boil. A faint pink hue began to tinge the edges of my vision … but not enough to block out the fact that my mother had buried her face in her hands yet again.

“You’re right,” she said. “I was a senior in high school. I should have known better. The four of us — Seth’s father, Nate; and Farah’s father, Bill; and your uncle Chris — we used to go out to that island all the time. I loved it so much … not only because of the birds, which were so beautiful, but because I could get away from your grandmother. She was … well, she was so pushy. She didn’t understand why I loved nature so much. She was always trying to get me to walk with her in the cemetery for some reason.”

I knew exactly why Grandma had always been trying to get my mother to walk with her in the cemetery. She’d been trying to hook her up with John, so she could kill him. Even then, my grandmother had been possessed by a Fury. Mom clearly hadn’t had a very happy childhood.

Still, that didn’t excuse her behavior.

“Gee,” I heard myself saying. “I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t enjoy a nice stroll around the graveyard, considering your affinity for human skeletons.”

John shot me a disapproving look that clearly said, Now is not the time to be sarcastic to your mother.

“I deserve that,” Mom said miserably. “I know. But the truth is, as much as I protest when your father complains about my mother, I couldn’t stand being around her, either. Nate had a boat. So did a lot of our friends. We’d have little parties out at Reef Key. We truly had some wonderful times.”

“Sure,” Alex said. “Of course you did.” He pulled a sheet of paper from the file in front of him. It was a photocopy of a very ancient-looking legal document. “The Rectors own Reef Key. Here’s the deed.”

Alex passed the photocopy to me. It had a lot of aforesaids and upon their oaths in spidery handwriting, but ultimately declared that on the fifth of June AD 1845, William Joseph Rector personally appeared before the judge and was awarded a certain piece of unoccupied land belonging to the government of the United States of America situated in the township of Isla Huesos. That piece of property would heretofore be known forever after as Reef Key.

Before that, it had been known as Caja de Muertos.

“Caja de Muertos?” I looked up. Though my mom’s side of the family was Spanish, the only words in their native language I knew were dirty words I’d been taught by the housekeeper we’d had when I was kid. I was pretty sure muertos meant dead, though.

“Coffin Island,” Alex translated for me as he plucked the deed from my fingers. “Embrace your heritage.” To my mom, he said, “Those Spanish explorers who discovered Isla Huesos in the fifteen hundreds. They called it Isle of Bones because the beach was covered in skeletons. What’d they do with all the skeletons? They didn’t just leave them there, did they?”

Mom didn’t say anything else. She simply looked down at her hands.

The pink tinge deepened until the words were swimming before my eyes. It was difficult to make out anything — or anyone — in the room. Where John was standing, I saw only a vague dark shadow.

I felt an overwhelming urge to reach out to grasp his hand, but at that moment a strong gust of wind blew through my mother’s wide-open French doors. Even though the rain outside was gone, the wind that had fueled the storm raged on.

You were like a kite flying high in the wind, with no one holding its strings. Mr. Liu’s words popped, unbidden, into my head. Only the wind that fueled you was your anger.

No wonder I’d felt such a strong urge to reach for John. Mr. Liu was right. I really did need to get control of my own strings, or I’d blow away.

I reached for the handle of the whip Mr. Liu had given to me. I’d slung the belt around my waist on my way back downstairs after brushing my teeth. I wasn’t sure why.

Now I knew. The minute my fingers closed around the handle, the pink began to fade.

“Wait,” I said. “Those explorers buried the remains they found, didn’t they? On Coffin Island? Is that why it’s called that? Is that why you found all those bones there? A storm or something uncovered them?”

Mom brought her hands from her face. Unlike me, she hadn’t noticed the wind. “Bones aren’t all we found there,” she said.

“What else, Dr. Cabrero?” John asked gently, as he returned from closing the French doors.

“Gold?” I asked. My mind was spinning, trying to think why she could look so pale.

Alex shook his head. “Square grouper.”