Pearl shook her head but kept her eyes on the screen. And she didn’t open her mouth again until the show ended and she and Harold headed upstairs together to go to bed, and with a meaningful expression that Anders couldn’t read to save his life, said: “Good night. Sleep well.”
Chapter 22
Anders blinked into the darkness and glanced over at the alarm clock on his nightstand. It was analog, not digital, so he squinted to try to make out the hands in the shadows— eleven thirty? And then tried to determine what had wakened him. A noise? He had a fuzzy memory of a light plinking sound, but listened carefully and heard nothing now. He closed his eyes to return to sleep when suddenly something hit the window with such force, his eyes popped open at the report and he sat directly up in bed. He stared at the glass, taking in the three-inch spiderweb fissure, then slid out of bed in the dark room and carefully walked over to it, hackles raised, every muscle on alert—but for what he wasn’t sure. He stayed on the periphery of the window frame, on the very off chance it was some kind of attack. Perhaps a world war had broken out, and they were attacking Frick Island first. How would he know? It wasn’t like his cell got any alerts out here.
He poked his head forward and peered out. Not seeing any fighter jets, he scrolled his eyes downward, until his gaze landed on Piper, lit up by the glow of the back porch light, her shoulders hunched around her ears, her hands clutching her cheeks in a look of dismay. Chalking up the weird buzz in his stomach to relief that he was not in the midst of a battle for mankind, he raised the window carefully, waiting for the shattered glass to fall out of the pane at any second. Fortunately, it held.
“Oops,” she whispered, when he stuck his head out into the night air.
“What are you doing?”
“Shhh. Not so loud.”
“You want me to be quiet?” he whisper-shouted. “You just shattered a window.”
She scrunched her nose. “It always works in the movies. How was I supposed to know the storm windows were in?” Her bottom lip protruded in a slight pout.
A grin threatened to pull Anders’s mouth skyward, but he forced it to remain passive, remembering his exasperating search for her. “Where were you all day?”
“Come here. I want to show you something.”
He narrowed his eyes, irritated she didn’t answer his question. Not only had he been waiting around for her all day, but now—in the middle of the night—she just expected him to jump when she said so. And he was even more irritated that he knew he was going to.
“It’s really late.”
“Are you a senior citizen?” she said, still whispering like they were children playing a game of telephone. “It’s not even midnight.”
“Fine. Give me five minutes.”
“Hurry,” she urged.
He was downstairs in two.
—
Three differences stood out in Anders’s second ride to Graver’s Beach in the span of seven hours: (1) He wasn’t alone. (2) Moonlight, instead of the sun, lit the path in front of him. (3) Despite the cold night air, his thighs burned like fire with the exertion of trying to keep up with Piper.
“Why are we going so fast?” he huffed, the wind tearing through his sweatshirt as if it were made of tissue paper.
“I don’t want to miss it.”
“Miss what?”
“You’ll see.”
Anders suppressed a growl, growing progressively vexed at Piper’s secrecy—and his willingness to go along with it.
After they dropped their bikes, Piper tossed Anders a flashlight and they took off, picking their way through the rocks on the beach, crabs skittering sideways out of their bright rays of light, until they finally reached a sandy stretch. Piper abruptly stopped and put her hand out.
“Turn off your flashlight. It’ll confuse them.”
“Them? Oh, God,” Anders breathed. Knowing her, it was a colony of cockroaches or a cluster of . . . maggots. Or something else equally horrifying.
After their eyes adjusted to the darkness lit up only by the moon, Piper scanned the sand. “There!” she said. “Come on.”
Anders tentatively followed at her heels and stopped beside her, mimicking her movement—bent at the waist and peering down into a large patch of sand that looked like it had been messed about by an enthusiastic child with a shovel.
“Shoot. They’re gone,” she said. “We missed it.”
“What did we miss?” Anders whispered.
Piper straightened her spine. “It was a sea turtle nest. We haven’t had one out here for two years. And then I found this one a few weeks ago. I wasn’t sure, though; it’s really late. They usually lay their eggs in May and hatch late summer. So I don’t know if the warmer water messed them up or this mom got lost or what. I’ve been keeping an eye on it, and when I saw the movement earlier tonight, I knew.”
Anders stared at her as it dawned on him that she was at Graver’s Beach earlier this evening—had he just missed her? How had he not seen her? He opened his mouth to say something, just as movement in the sand caught his eye. “Wait—what’s that?”
He squinted as Piper leaned back over and they both watched with bated breath, the grains of sand tumbling to the side, as if pouring out of a broken hourglass. Suddenly, something darker than the sand protruded from the surface. A tiny turtle nose, and then, on either side, tiny turtle flippers.
Piper let out an appropriately tiny squeal. Once it was free of the sand, the turtle struggled to orient itself. When it finally did, it started pushing forward on the sand with its flippers.
“Oh, no, it’s listing left. Go straight,” she urged, as if the turtle understood English. “It’s got to make it to the ocean to survive.”
“Should we pick it up?”
“No! We can’t touch
