Chapter 8: The Old Photo Album

Lila didn’t sleep well that night.

She lay in the strange bed at Cane’s place, listening to his deliberately muffled footsteps in the living room next door. She knew he wasn’t asleep either—he got up every half hour, walked to the window, lifted the curtain a crack to look outside. She counted. This was the fourth time.

At two in the morning, she heard him leave. The door clicked softly shut; the engine receded.

She waited ten minutes, then got up.

Not to run. She’d noticed that the basement door in this house had been padlocked with an old lock since she’d arrived. And before Cane left, he’d stood in front of that door for a long time.

She used a hairpin—you always carried one in her line of work—to pick the old padlock. It clicked open.

The basement was full of old fishing gear, life preservers, and stacks of newspapers. Lila turned on her phone flashlight. The beam swept the corner and stopped.

Corkboard covered the wall, pinned with clippings, photos, handwritten notes.

At the top was a missing-person poster from twenty years ago. Five headshots side by side, names beneath:

Megan Doyle. Seventeen. Sandy Chen. Sixteen. Tina Brogan. Eighteen. Holly Watson. Seventeen. Emily Mason. Seventeen.

Lila’s legs gave out. She caught the wall.

Her sister’s face, pinned side by side with four other girls. Five faces, five smiles, all seventeen or eighteen.

And at the bottom of the corkboard, circled in red pen, was a line in Cane’s handwriting:

“It wasn’t just five.”

Lila’s breathing stopped.

She reached for the thing pressed under that line—a tanned-paper old photo album. She pulled it out and opened it.

The first page was a town high school group photo. She spotted Emily immediately—second row, half a head taller than her classmates, a little fang showing when she smiled. Lila herself was on the far edge of the front row, missing a front tooth.

Her fingers traced her sister’s face. Tears dropped on the photo paper without warning.

She turned the pages.

Halfway through, her hand stopped.

Tucked in the album was a photo that didn’t belong to the group shots: a man, back to the camera, standing on the Black Reef rocks, holding a girl’s wrist. The girl’s face was blurred by the fog, unreadable.

But the man’s back—broad shoulders, that long scar on his neck, black rain jacket—Lila had seen it that very afternoon.

It was Cane.

On the back, in faded pencil, a small line:

“He was there too. He saw it.”

An engine sound came from the stairs.

Cane was back.

Lila snapped the album shut, but it was too late—the basement door slammed open, Cane standing in the doorway, flashlight beam straight in her face.

His face, in that beam, was as white as the reef.

“You went through my basement.” He said. It wasn’t a question.

“This photo.” Lila held up the album, her voice shaking. “That night, you were on Black Reef. What did you see?”

Cane didn’t answer.

He only slowly, slowly, closed the basement door behind him.