The Purgatorium
Authors: Eva Pohler
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Suspense, #Teen & Young Adult, #Social & Family Issues, #Depression & Mental Illness
The
PURGATORIUM
Publis
hed by Green Press
Copyright 2013 Eva Pohler
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Chapter Four: A Change of Heart
Chapter Seven: The Sunset Cruise
Chapter Thirteen: The Man at Punta Arena
Chapter Fourteen: Escape at Laguna Harbor
Chapter Fifteen: Danger in Central Valley
Chapter Sixteen: Surprise on the Beach
Chapter Seventeen: The Body Beneath the Pier
Chapter Eighteen: A Dark Night
Chapter Nineteen: Love Beneath the Oak
Chapter Twenty: Trouble in the Woods
A morning fog was just beginning to thin in the sticky, ocean breeze. Whether it was the sharp smell of dead fish or lingering anxiety from the plane ride, Daphne could not eat when Cam offered to buy her a snack at a stand in the harbor. He bought himself a baked pretzel, and then the two of them followed Dr. Hortense Gray up the ramp and onto the catamaran, pulling their bags behind them.
They maneuvered through a crowd of school-age children in matching yellow t-shirts. Of the twenty or so other passengers, most were men in their thirties and forties. She and Cam were the only teenagers aboard.
Daphne stood at the railing overlooking the water with Cam on one side of her and the doctor on the other. The wind whipped her brown hair around her face despite her efforts to tuck it behind her ears. She missed this beauty. She’d forgotten how breathtaking it was. Her parents used to take her and her brother and sister to the beach all the time. There was nothing like gazing at the ocean where it met the sky on the horizon.
But the beauty could not stop her from trembling, could not stop the dread gripping her chest. Cam had said a wildlife refuge and a resort with pristine beaches. He hadn’t said a thing about therapeutic exercises. She’d had to hear it from this strange doctor who had met them at the airport in Ventura. Was the doctor like a life coach? Would Daphne have to climb a rock wall or plunge down a zipline? She should have known her parents wouldn’t let her go with Cam to a getaway resort just for fun. She should have been more suspicious. Tears pricked her eyes. She felt betrayed. Betrayed by her parents and her best friend.
As the catamaran reached the open sea, a pod of dolphins leapt ahead of them, as if guiding them to their destination.
“Look!” Cam pointed at the group of four leaping in turns from the water beside the boat.
Daphne’s cheeks stretched into a smile in spite of everything. The dolphins were amazing.
“Just wait,” Cam said, his blond hair flattening against his head with the wind. “We might see a humpback whale. Keep your fingers crossed.”
She stood close to Cam’s tall, wiry frame as though the two years they had rarely spoken had never existed. She hadn’t even so much as texted him a happy birthday wish last month when he had turned eighteen. For the millionth time, she wished she could go back to that night she had failed to get out of bed.
An hour passed with no humpback sightings, but soon a great mound of rock could be seen—bald, solid, smooth like the skin of a whale, and round like a bowling ball. Daphne couldn’t imagine how such a rocky place could hold any kind of paradise. Then a long, narrow pier became visible, and beside it, a rocky beach. The boat docked at the end of the pier, and all but Daphne, Cam, the doctor, and the captain climbed out.
Where were the pristine beaches?
The captain then turned the boat north and skirted around to another part of the island, where there were more rocky crags with waves crashing into and away from them, tossing the boat side to side, until they came into a large harbor full of other boats.
To Daphne’s right were hundreds of pelicans roosting on a rocky beach of shale. Some slept standing up, others cleaned their feathers, and still others walked around inspecting the shoreline and the shallow waters surrounding it.
Kara would have liked this, she thought.
“They’re looking for sardines in the kelp beds,” Cam said.
Daphne used her hand as a visor. “Look at them all.”
An even longer pier than the first shot out into the harbor, and they were now moving to it.
“Prisoners Harbor,” Cam said.
This side of the island was certainly more beautiful than the eastern point at Scorpion Anchorage, but Daphne still saw no evidence of pristine beaches. A wildlife refuge this island may be, but where was the resort?
Once they docked, Daphne and Cam followed Dr. Gray up five rungs on a ladder to the pier, and then they dragged their luggage across the narrow row of boards toward several flights of steps. Descending from the steps ahead of them were two people, an African-American boy and girl in their teens. The girl was bald as the rock at Scorpion Anchorage, as though she had undergone chemotherapy.
“Look at me!” the girl growled at Dr. Gray, and Daphne thought perhaps they were related, having the same round dark eyes and high cheek bones.
“Come along, Daphne,” Dr. Gray said, ignoring the girl.
The girl grabbed Daphne’s wrist and started to say something, but Cam moved between them.
“We don’t want any trouble,” he said.
“Are you okay?” Daphne asked the girl, trying to see around Cam, but the bald teen turned away, scuttled down the pier, and quickly boarded the boat.
“What’s her deal?” Daphne asked Cam.
“Don’t know,” he said, leading her onward.
“That was odd.”
“Yeah. It was. Come on.”
The squawking of the pelicans could be heard from the several flights of wooden steps, but they were less visible until Daphne reached the summit near a dirt road, where a jeep and its driver waited. The driver was an older man, maybe in his forties, with tanned skin and a straw cowboy hat. He nodded at them as they approached.
“Hello, Roger,” Dr. Gray said.
“Nice to have you back, Hortense,” the driver said with a southern drawl. “The island ain’t the same without you.”
From this point, Daphne looked out over the ocean and, although the view was spectacular, she frowned. This wasn’t what she had expected.
It wasn’t like she hadn’t asked a lot of questions. Cam had gone the summer before, and then, this summer, one rare evening while she’d sat in her tree in the backyard, the thick oak leaves forming a shield around her, he had told her about it.
She hadn’t seen him in the tree-house on the other side of the six-foot wooden fence that separated their two yards. When he called out to her, she’d been crying again, and although she had wanted to scramble down the trunk and run inside and hide, he’d asked her a question that had made her pause.
“If you could spend your final days anywhere in the whole wide world, where would it be?”
“Are you drunk?” she had asked.
“No. Just curious. ” Then he had added, “I miss you, Daph.”
“I’d spend my last days on a beach somewhere beautiful,” she had said.
“I know just the place.” He had jumped from his tree-house, had bolted over the fence, and had landed at the base of her tree faster than she had been able to wipe her eyes.
“I’m sorry you didn’t get to see a humpback,” Cam said beside her now. “Maybe on the way back.”
They drove by picnic tables, trees, a kayak rental, and an outhouse as the driver took them along a canyon ridge toward the center of the island. A few minutes later they came up on two other buildings with solar panels turned toward the sun, a long wooden deck, and two greenhouses. To their right was a deeper valley with a stream running down the middle and pine trees.
“Look there!” Hortense Gray pointed above the valley. “A bald eagle. See it?”
“Oh, yeah,” Daphne said.
“Isn’t it fantastic?” Cam handed her a pair of binoculars from his bag. “Use these.”
She took them and looked closely at the majestic bird as it soared through the sky above the valley.
“See if you can spot any foxes,” Cam said, full of enthusiasm.
Daphne scoured the landscape for wildlife. Gulls flew to and from the sea up high above where the eagle soared. The valley looked like a manicured fairway on a top-notch golf course with a stream running down the middle of it and branching off into smaller ones. Along the sides of the “fairway” were pines and shrubs and grassy knolls. The spring ran heavily from the highland but narrowed in places where it gently rushed over rocks.
A figure stepped into her view through the binoculars, but it was no fox. She watched it, focused the lenses. It was a person. A hiker? A girl with long black hair trailing behind her ran along the stream, turning back to look, as though she were being followed.
Just then a man grabbed the girl by the hair and dragged her back up the hill and into a copse of trees.
Daphne’s stomach dropped. “Oh my God!”
“What?” Dr. Gray asked.
Daphne’s tongue twisted in her mouth as she stammered, “A man….and a girl! He’s hurting her!”
The doctor took the binoculars and pointed them toward the valley. “Where? I don’t see anything?”
“I swear they’re out there,” Daphne said, her stomach forming a knot. “I saw them. We have to do something!” She gave Cam a pleading look, and said again, “We have to do something.” Why wasn’t he more alarmed? “We have to go down there and help her. What are we waiting for?”
“Roger, take us down into the valley, please,” Dr. Gray said.
The driver sped downhill. The road ended about twenty yards from the spring. Roger stopped the jeep, and all four climbed out.
Daphne pointed to the ground, insistently. “They were here, I swear I saw them. He was pulling her by the hair.”
When the adults looked back at her blankly, she took off running through the nearby trees, her heart beating wildly. Why wasn’t anyone taking her seriously? Panic had overtaken her and she couldn’t think. She couldn’t think. “Hello?” She saw and heard no one.
The others also called out and began to search the trees.
After several minutes, they all met up again.
Dr. Gray said, “Oh, this is no good.”
“What should we do?” Cam asked, out of breath.
The doctor put a hand on Daphne’s shoulder. “Please don’t be offended by what I’m about to say.”
Daphne couldn’t believe the patronizing look on the taller woman’s face. “I didn’t imagine it,” she said, panting.
“It’s been a long, tiring trip, and islands are famous for their mirages, especially this one,” Dr. Gray said.
“Not mirages,” Roger said. “Ghosts.”
“Please, Roger. Don’t start.” Dr. Gray shook her head.
“What ghosts?” Daphne asked. Even though she didn’t believe in ghosts, goose-bumps popped up along her arms.
“Let’s go on to the resort,” Dr. Gray said. “I’ll phone the naval guards when we get there and tell them what you saw.”
“What ghosts?” Daphne asked again in the jeep in the backseat beside Cam. She twisted back with her eyes held up to the binoculars, scanning the stream and nearby woods for signs of the girl and her attacker as the jeep climbed toward the canyon ridge.
“We aren’t going to talk about nonsense,” the doctor said.
“She has a right to know about the island’s legends,” Roger objected.
“Is this the one about Misink?” Cam asked. “The guy who threw the men in the ocean and took the women on his rainbow bridge?”
Hortense Gray turned from the front passenger seat. “The Chumash believed the first people grew from seeds planted on this island by the Earth Goddess, Hutash. When the island became overpopulated with people, she sent down Misink, the guardian of nature, to set things right. They say each year Misink threw six young men into the ocean where they turned into dolphins. That’s why the Chumash consider the dolphins to be their brothers.
“Misink also took six unmarried women and had them for himself. They say he took them into the sky by way of his rainbow bridge, and they were never seen alive again.”
“What does this have to do with ghosts?” Daphne put down the binoculars, the deep valley now out of view.
Roger said, “People say Misink comes for women about your age to take with him to the skies, and sometimes they come back and wander this here island.”
“Interesting legend, but you don’t expect me to believe that was Misink out there in the valley, do you?” Daphne smelled a set-up. “Is this some kind of joke?” She expected one of them to say,
Bwahahahaha
, any minute now.
Roger coughed and cleared his voice.
Cam whispered, “Apparently Roger is a believer.”
“Like you can talk,” she whispered back. Cam had made plenty of claims throughout their childhood of having seen his grandmother in his attic. Her brother, Joey, a year older than Cam, still believed Cam’s grandmother spoke to him.
Roger said, “I dare you to spend one night at the old Christy Ranch, and then you can laugh at me all you like.”
“What’s old Christy Ranch?” Daphne asked.
“It’s on the western end of the island,” Roger said. “That there ranch house is haunted by the wife of a slave trader.”
“Have you seen her ghost?” Cam asked.
“No, but I’ve heard the screaming.”
“What screaming?” Daphne asked.
“Out on Haunted Bridge,” Roger replied. “I’ve heard the screaming with my own ears. My pal and I searched all over in the morning and found no trace of anyone and no explanation for the screams. People say the wife of the slave trader was horrified when she learned what her husband done, and, once when he was headed back for more slaves, she sunk his ship with him and his crew aboard. They say she went crazy until she died. They say she’s responsible for a lot of the ships that wreck in that there part of the sea.”