I shook my head. “We just need to be sure that you pick up your note the same night I put it there, and I’ll be sure to pick up whatever note you leave for me first thing in the morning.”
“Won’t your parents suspect something if you go into the lighthouse before you go to school?”
“I don’t think so. I’ll try not to let them know, but even if they do see me, it wouldn’t be that unusual.”
“We need to do this more than once a week,” Mr. Hewitt said. “At least twice. How about every Tuesday and Friday night? Will that work?”
I nodded. “But you have to promise you’ll get that note every Tuesday and Friday night. Otherwise, if one of my parents finds it, I’d have to tell them what I was doing.”
“No.” He looked angry for a minute. “Under no circumstances do you tell them. You’ll make something up to protect what we’re doing. Your parents mustn’t know.” He shook his head. “They would kill me if they knew I was involving you in this.”
“Well, just make sure we each get the notes when we say we will.” I felt like I was suddenly the one giving the orders.
So, now I am working for the FBI, in a way! This is the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life and I can’t tell anyone. It’s going to be hard to keep my mouth shut around Sandy, but I will.
CHAPTER 30
Alec woke up at ten minutes before midnight. He opened his eyes, and through the bedroom’s wall of windows, he could see the triangle of moonlight shimmering on the sound, bright enough that he knew that was what had awakened him. Although the day had been cloudy, the night was beautiful, the half-moon surrounded by stars. An idea came to him, and he smiled to himself.
Rolling over, he gently shook his wife’s shoulder. “Olivia?”
“Hmm?” she said. Slowly, she opened her eyes. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “But it’s beautiful out. I’m going to wake the kids up and take them to Jockey’s Ridge.”
“You’re what?” She laughed, raising herself up on one elbow to get a better look at him.
“I used to do that all the time with Lacey and Clay when they were little,” he said, missing those days all of a sudden. “Just a bit of an adventure.”
She turned her head to look at the clock. “It’s almost midnight,” she said.
“On a Saturday night,” he countered. “They can sleep in in the morning.” He looked out the window again. “Look how clear it is.”
Olivia rubbed her hands over her face as if trying to wipe away the sleep. “You’ll never be able to wake Jack up,” she said.
Jack was a deep sleeper and had been known to sleep through thunderstorms that kept everyone else in the house wide-awake.
“Bet I can,” Alec said.
“And Jockey’s Ridge is closed at dark,” Olivia said.
“So?”
She smiled. “You’re evil,” she said. “You’re going to teach your children to stray outside the law.”
“So, you want to come be evil with us?”
She hesitated, but only for a moment. “Sure,” she said, tossing off the covers. “I should be there to take the kids home when you get arrested.”
“Great!” He was out of bed and heading for the closet. “I’ll get Jack and you can get Maggie.” He dressed quickly, then went to wake his son.
Jack was groggy and disgruntled as he opened his eyes. Alec was shaking the boy’s arm, and when he saw the misery in his son’s face, he felt a little guilty for waking him.
“I don’t want to get up, Dad,” Jack moaned, leaning against his father as Alec pulled him into a sitting position. That was the only way to wake him up in the morning for school, as well. Get him to sit up and keep him sitting. Otherwise, he would fall right back to sleep.
“You’ll be happy you got up, Jack,” Alec said. “I used to do this with Lacey and Clay all the time when they were your age. They didn’t like getting up any more than you did, but I bet they’d tell you it was worth it.”
Jack’s weight grew even heavier against Alec’s side.
“Come on, now,” Alec said. “Do I have to carry you?”
Jack nodded, eyes shut, and Alec laughed. Jack was years beyond the carrying stage.
One hand on his son’s shoulder, Alec reached toward the lamp on the night table and switched it on. The boy winced from the light, but it did the trick.
“Okay, okay,” he said, rising to his feet. “I’m up.”
“You can stay in your pj’s,” Alec said, knowing that Olivia wouldn’t be crazy about that idea, but he was anxious to get on the road.
They met the women of the house in the kitchen, where Olivia was dropping a can of insect repellent into her rattan beach bag. Smart lady. He would have forgotten. Maggie had on shorts and a halter top, and she ran toward Alec to wrap her arms around his waist.
“You’re the daddy with the best ideas!” She looked up at him, pure adoration in her eyes.
“I’m glad you think so, sweetie,” he said. She was a lot like him, with a lanky body and more energy than she knew what to do with. Jack was more like Paul Macelli, his biological father. Smart and cerebral, with a touch of the poet in him.
“He’s not dressed.” Olivia looked disapprovingly at Jack’s pajamas.
“At least he’s up,” Alec said.
Olivia relented with a smile. “Good point,” she said, and Alec knew she had turned this night over to him.
In the garage, they piled into the van, his barefoot children buckled into the back seat and Olivia next to him in the front. Alec backed out of the driveway, then drove up the short street to Highway 12, where he turned right.
“You used to do this with Clay and Lacey?” Jack asked.
“Uh-huh.” Their car was the only vehicle on the road. Alec liked that feeling of isolation.
“We should go get them,” Jack said. “Take them with us.”
“Yeah!” Maggie said. Both kids adored their older siblings.
“Kiss River’s in the opposite direction,” Alec said, although the idea was appealing. Lacey would be game, but he doubted Clay would want to get up in the middle of the night. Clay’s joie de vivre had died with Terri, understandably so. It was hard enough for him to function during the day, much less at night.
“We might as well go get them,” Olivia said. “If we’re doing something this insane, we might as well do it all the way.”
Grinning at being given permission, Alec turned the van around in a parking lot, and drove onto 12 again, this time in the direction of Kiss River. After a few miles, he noticed Jack in his rearview mirror, struggling to keep his eyes open, his head resting against the van window.
“We’re almost to Kiss River, Jack,” Alec said, and to his surprise, Jack opened his eyes and sat up straight.
They reached the unmarked road to Kiss River, and Alec turned the van into the dark, narrow tunnel formed by the trees. Not even the moonlight could reach this shrouded road.
“I always feel like I’m going to find a dead body on this road,” Jack said. “It’s so spooky.”
“Or a witch,” Maggie said.
“There’s no such thing as witches,” Jack informed his younger sister with disdain.
“There’s no such thing as dead bodies, either,” Maggie countered with the innocence of an overprotected child.
The truth was, Alec himself did not like driving down this road, not because of a fear of dead bodies or witches, but because of the memories. The aching uneasiness accompanied him anytime he came out here.
He had a key to the chain, and he handed it to Olivia, who got out to unlock the padlock. She looked cute in the headlights of the car, like a kid rather than a forty-nine-year-old physician. Her uncombed hair fell nearly to her shoulders and she wrinkled her nose at him as she struggled with the lock. Once she was in the van again, Alec drove onto the gravel road, and they bounced over the ruts and tree roots that were hard to avoid in the dark.
“Someo
ne’s up,” Olivia said as they pulled into the parking lot.
Above the shrubs surrounding the lot, they could see that one of the upstairs lights was on in the keeper’s house. Stained glass filled the upper half of the window and put a lump in Alec’s throat. He should be used to Lacey’s stained glass by now, but it still caused a visceral reaction in him, a combination of surprise and sadness, each time he saw it.
“Is that Lacey’s room?” Maggie asked.
“I think it’s the one Gina’s renting,” Alec said. He had frankly forgotten about the visitor.
“Who’s Gina?” Jack asked.
“She’s a woman who’s renting a room from Lacey and Clay for a while,” Alec said. He unfastened his seat belt. “I’ll go get them. You guys can stay here.”
He walked through the parking lot to the wide, sandy yard. The moon was so bright, it cast his shadow, long and lean, in the white sand as he walked toward the house. He didn’t want to knock on the front door. Most likely, that would bring Gina downstairs, since she appeared to be the only person awake. Instead, he found some shells in the sand near the foundation of the house and stood below Clay’s window, tossing the shells at the screen. “Clay?” he called in a voice barely louder than a whisper.
In a moment, he saw his son’s face through the screen.
“Dad?” Clay asked. “What’s going on?”
“I’m taking Jack and Maggie to Jockey’s Ridge,” he said. “They want you and Lace to come along.”
Clay laughed. “You’re nuts,” he said.
“Come on. You can sleep late in the morning.”
Clay hesitated a moment. “Can Gina come?” he asked.
“Of course,” Alec said quickly, although the thought didn’t please him. He’d wanted this to be a family outing. He understood, though, that they could not politely leave Gina alone in the keeper’s house, especially when she was already awake. He still felt distrustful of her.
He walked back to the van. All the upstairs lights were on by the time he reached it, and the keeper’s house glowed like a cathedral. In a few minutes, the three residents of the house arrived in the parking lot, and Jack and Maggie got out to let them climb into the rear bench seat. As they settled into the van, Alec overheard Lacey say to Gina, “I told you my father is not ordinary.”
Gina said something back to Lacey, which he couldn’t hear, but then she called out to him, “Thanks for inviting me, Dr. O’Neill.”
“Call me Alec,” he said. “And you’re very welcome.”
Everyone was quiet in the van on the drive to Jockey’s Ridge. Alec felt the same sort of satisfaction he always did when he had his four children together. They were healthy and beautiful, if not perfectly happy. His younger two were happy, but they’d known nothing but joy in their lives so far. Even Jack, who knew that he was not Alec’s biological son, seemed to feel he was lucky to have two fathers instead of one.
There were no cars, no people, in the parking lot near the dunes. They traipsed out across the sand, then began climbing the dunes in the eerie moonlight. Alec had not thought to bring a flashlight, but the moon was bright enough to allow them to see one another as they clambered through the sand. He could see well enough to know that Clay’s gaze was on Gina as they climbed. And Gina’s was on Jack and Maggie.
“Have you been up here before?” Olivia asked Gina when they’d reached the crest of the first dune. They would have to climb down the other side of this dune, then begin climbing up again to reach their goal, the peak of the largest dune.
“I’ve seen the dunes from the road, but haven’t been up here,” Gina said. She was a bit breathless, but then, so was Alec. She looked out toward the black ocean. “They didn’t look this high from down there.”
It took them ten minutes more to reach the crest of the tallest dune, and from there they could see the half disk of the moon reflected in both sound and ocean. But they were really here for the stars.
“Okay, Jack and Maggie,” he said. “Make a bed for yourselves in the sand.”
He listened as Lacey instructed her younger siblings in the fine art of flattening the sand on the angled dune top so that they could lie there comfortably, with nothing above them but sky. He and Olivia smoothed the sand for their own bed and lay down.
Alec put his arm around his wife. “Thanks for going along with this,” he said.
“It was a great idea,” she admitted. “Although I still have visions of the article in the newspaper, ‘Olivia Simon, Director of Kill Devil Hills Emergency Room, Arrested on Jockey’s Ridge.’”
Alec laughed, giving her shoulders a squeeze. Olivia had been the brunt of a far more destructive article years earlier, and he knew she would forever feel a need to keep her reputation spotless.
“Look!” Lacey said suddenly.
From the corner of his eye, Alec saw his daughter raise her arm to point to the eastern sky.
“Oh, you guys missed it,” Lacey said. “It was so—”
“There’s another,” Gina said, raising her own arm.
“I want to see!” Maggie complained. “I can’t see any.”
“Just keep watching, Mag,” Clay said.
“I don’t know where to look!”
“Relax,” Alec said. “Let your eyes take in the whole sky instead of just focusing on one star.”
They spotted a few more falling stars before they saw a large white-green ball of light shoot across the sky right above them, a long tail trailing behind it. It was the most extraordinary sight Alec had ever seen. He knew every one of them had seen it, as a collective gasp rose up from the dune.
“What was that?” Lacey asked in astonishment.
“A UFO!” Jack said excitedly.
“It was a fireball,” Gina said. She sounded quite excited herself. “I’ve never seen one before, but that’s what it was. Look.” She pointed to the sky. “You can still see the tail.”
She was right. The tail had grown fainter, but it still cut across the sky directly above them.
“What’s a fireball?” Clay and Jack asked the question at the same moment.
“It’s a meteor, but an enormous one,” she said. “And very bright. You’re supposed to report them when you see them because they’re pretty rare.”
“Should we report it?” Lacey asked.
“I think we can do it online,” Gina said.
“Is the tail made from bits of the meteor coming off?” Jack’s eyes were still on the tail, which was starting to lose its linear shape.
“Actually, no, although that’s a good guess,” Gina said. “It’s just air molecules glowing from the fireball.”
“Wow,” Maggie said with reverence. “It’s scary, though. Do shooting stars ever fall on the earth?”
Alec started to answer, but Gina beat him to it. “They sure do,” she said. “But not often. Only somewhere between twenty and fifty a day.”
“Fifty a day!” Jack said. “That’s tons. How come we never see any?”
“It sounds like a lot, but think about it, Jack,” Gina said. “Let’s say fifty meteorites hit the earth every day. Where do you think they would fall? Think about the earth. About a globe. What does it look like?”
They were all lying down, and Gina’s voice was disembodied, floating in the air. Alec had forgotten she was a teacher, but he heard the teacher in her now.
“It’s round,” Maggie said.
“And what’s that round globe covered with?” Gina asked.
“Land and water,” Jack said.
“Right. It’s actually about two-thirds water,” Gina said. “So what does that mean for the meteorites that are falling?”
“A bunch would just fall in the water,” Maggie said, engaged.
“Right!” Gina said. “So, let’s say two-thirds of the meteorites fall in the water. That leaves around sixteen or so to fall on the land. And picture that globe again. Is all the land populated?”
“You mean, have people on it?” Maggie asked.
r /> “Right.”
“No way,” Jack said. “There’s lots of places without any people.”
“And lots of places with very few people,” Gina added. “About one-fourth of the land is either uninhabited or not very inhabited. So, what does that mean for the meteorites?”
“We’re down to twelve,” Clay said.
“I don’t get it.” Maggie was confused.
Olivia answered her. “The meteorites that fall in those unpopulated areas will go unnoticed,” she explained.
“Right,” Gina said. “And about half those twelve meteorites will fall during the night, when they won’t be seen.”
“You could see a meteorite if it fell, though, because it’s so bright,” Jack argued.
“You would think so, Jack, but something happens to it when it reaches earth’s atmosphere and it doesn’t glow anymore,” Gina said. “So when it falls, it actually looks something like a plain old rock.”
“So, there’s only six meteorites that fall on earth every day during daylight hours,” Lacey said.
“Right,” Gina said.
“That’s still too many if they land on your head,” Maggie pointed out, and Alec chuckled to himself.
“I don’t think you have to worry about that, Maggie,” Gina said.
They grew quiet again. She was a good teacher, Alec had to admit. His kids had hung on her every word.
Jack suddenly sat up. “Hey, Maggie,” he said. “Let’s roll down.”
Maggie was instantly on her feet, tugging on Gina. “You do it, too,” she said.
Gina laughed, and Alec was surprised when she lay down in the sand next to his children and started to roll with them. He sat up, watching them spin down the hill, and he could hear their laughter and his daughter’s yelps even after he had lost sight of them in the darkness.
Clay was sitting up, too, watching, and Alec saw the small, sad smile on his son’s lips, the telltale bobbing of the Adam’s apple in his throat. Clay was so closed these days, so shut down, that it was impossible to know how to help him. They had both been widowed, but watching his child go through that experience was worse than going through it himself.