Blurb
From the award-winning author of Dead Souls and Poe comes an all-new bone-chilling novel where a mysterious island holds the terrifying answers to a woman’s past and future.
In 1939, on a remote Pacific island, botanical researcher Irene Greer plunges off a waterfall to her death, convinced the spirits of her dead husband and daughter had joined the nightmarchers—ghosts of ancient warriors that rise from their burial sites on moonless nights. But was it suicide, or did a strange young missionary girl, Agnes, play a role in Irene’s deteriorating state of mind?
It all seems like ancient family history to Julia Greer, who has enough problems of her own. A struggling journalist, she’s recovering from a divorce and is barely able to make rent, let alone appeal the court’s decision to give sole custody of their daughter to her ex-husband. When her elderly great-aunt offers her an outrageously large sum to travel to this remote island and collect samples of a very special flower, as well as find out what really happened to her sister Irene all those years ago, Julia thinks her life might finally be on an upward swing. She’s also tasked to connect with the island’s Church of Eternal Light, which her great-aunt suspects knows more about Irene’s tragic death than they’ve said.
But Julia finds this place isn’t so quick to give up its secrets. The Church is tight-lipped about the deaths that have contributed to its oddly large cemetery, as well as Irene’s final fate. The only person who seems to know more is a fellow traveler, Noah Cooper, who thinks that Julia’s not the only one on a mission to find the rare flower…which, if the rumors are true, could have world-changing properties.
What Julia does know is that the longer she stays on the island, the more the thin line begins to blur between truth and lies, reality and the fantastical…until she finds herself face to face with the real reason why the island is taboo….
Excerpt
Standing in the hotel room, a glass of merlot in her hand—real merlot, forty-five dollars a bottle, a splurge, but she deserves it after the hell she’s been through—with her boarding pass and itinerary for the morning flight printed, and her suitcase almost completely packed, she feels . . . dread. The same bottomless pit in her stomach she’d felt right before walking into court, alone and unrepresented.
It’s all happened so fast. Maybe it’s too much, too soon. Maybe she went from being terminally naive to being terminally skeptical.
Or maybe it’s because she’s starting to realize exactly what she signed on for. Like the suitcase with a false bottom—a special delivery. Julia hadn’t exactly been thrilled with the smuggling part, but Aunt Liddy insisted. We need to stay in touch, daily, and they collect cell phones on the flight over. So along with her new clothes, she has a GPS device her great-aunt called a favor into DARPA for, which also works as a cell phone even without a nearby satellite tower. She had to sign a nondisclosure agreement to get it. It has waypoints programmed into the GPS where Irene’s camp and the corpse flower might be, based on sketches from the notebook, and she can use the built-in camera to navigate the terrain, although she has a printed satellite map as backup. Also packed away are glass specimen jars with some kind of white gel, a knife, alcohol swabs (to sterilize the knife), a vial marked plant nutrients, and latex gloves. None of it on the “approved items to bring to Kapu” list of course. Insect repellent is prohibited; eco-friendly biodegradable sunscreen and shampoo/soap only; no cameras of any kind; no electronics, computers, or tablets; no alcohol or medication not prescribed by a doctor; 100 percent organic snacks in biodegradable packaging allowed (5 max).
Then there’s a medication regimen she’s to start as soon as she lands—small blue pills in an aluminum foil package with the Greer Enterprises slogan, Bringing You Tomorrow, Today. One pill in the morning, one at night—antibiotics, Bailey had said when she asked, a precaution against any number of nasty bacteria that might be lurking on the island. Legionnaires’ disease isn’t uncommon in that part of the world, and you’ll be trekking through some very biodiverse areas.
Julia wasn’t sure if she entirely believed her. A quick Google search hadn’t turned up any pharmaceuticals made by Greer Enterprises—why would they be producing their own antibiotics? And there are so many other things she still doesn’t know, gaps in the narrative.
Bailey made her a copy of Irene’s notebook and the letters, nicely bound, thoughtful extra pages for her own notes. She’s read through it from cover to cover, but can’t shake the feeling she’s missing something important.
Every ink drawing of the vegetation is so meticulous, as if each frond, stalk, or petal had been measured first. The work of a scientist, not an artist. Even Irene’s penmanship is nearly perfect, the strokes carefully considered, with nearly identical loops and a consistent forward slant. Julia traces her finger over some of the names. Aleurites moluccana. Hibiscus tiliaceus. Dicranopteris linearis. A woman, like her, pouring herself into a project, to focus on something besides what a mess her life had become.
But how could a woman so meticulous forget her husband and daughter in a fire, leave them in a burning house? And how did the fire start? It wasn’t too long after the tragedy that Irene, Liddy, Annabelle, and their father had moved to a ten-bedroom Victorian in Santa Barbara, funded by Charles’s fortune. Online, Julia finds an article referencing an inquest into the fire that had gone nowhere, as far as she can tell.
And she’s pretty sure some pages in the journal are missing. Why isn’t there a sketch of Agnes, or the village, or the Reverend? Along with the ink sketch of Irene’s camp, there’s one of Liddy drawn from memory. A fantastic view from a cliff on Kapu. On closer examination, she found the faintest outlines of what looked like the edge of torn paper close to the spine, picked up by the copier’s scanner. Her old, investigative instincts kicked in, firing up neurons that had atrophied.
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