Page 39 of The White Oak Lodge

Jack, who made messes wherever he went.

“I need to talk to you,” Amos blurted, surprising himself.

Nina eyed him nervously. “I know. But I don’t know if I want to know. I don’t know if I have it in me.”

Amos tilted his head. He was suddenly unsure what she meant.

Maybe she thought Amos was falling in love with her. Perhaps she wanted to push him back, tell him she was just getting out of a marriage, and she wasn’t sure her heart could take it.

Am I falling in love with her?Amos wondered. But he brushed the question aside.

“It’s about 1998,” Amos said. “It’s about what was going on back then.”

Nina’s eyes glinted with curiosity and fear. “What is it?”

“It’s better if I show you,” Amos said, gesturing toward the kitchen entrance of the old house.

Nina took a breath. “I don’t know. I really don’t know if I can take it.”

“I know,” Amos said. “But it’s important.”

He’d never told anyone before. But it was time to acknowledge the truth.

Maybe it would further his and Nina’s story. Perhaps it would help Nina find out what really happened to Jack.

But Jack has to be dead. Doesn’t he?

Nina gritted her teeth and took a long moment to think. “I don’t want the kids going inside.”

“No. I don’t want that, either.”

“Let me talk to them.”

Nina hurried down the beach to explain what was happening. Amos hung back, crossing his arms, letting them drop, feeling a mix of horror and adrenaline. What if he led her inside and found nothing? What if that dark door and that shadowy drop were only a part of his nightmares? What if he’d imagined the whole thing?

Nina bent down to chat with Will and Fiona, who nodded dutifully and followed her back to Amos. “They agreed to hang out by the entrance of the house and call in every thirty seconds to tell us they’re okay,” Nina said, smiling. She’d created a game out of it, a game to keep Fiona and Will occupied.

They were ten and eight. When Amos was ten, he’d had to fend for himself. But it was a different time, and Nina was a brilliant mother.

They reached the entrance. Will and Fiona sat on the grass and gazed into the shadows, watching as first Amos, then Nina went inside. Once inside the kitchen, where moss clung to the walls, and it looked as though a few animals had made wild nests, where the table and chairs remained right where they’d left them when they’d abandoned the house, Nina took Amos’s hand and breathed all the air from her lungs. Amos squeezed back and led her into the passageway, explaining as he went.

It was better to tell her when he didn’t have to look her in the eye.

“When I was sixteen, I was broke, so broke that I would do anything for cash,” he said. “Your brother knew that and invited me to the lodge to do some labor. Cleaning the stables, fixingthings up. I wasn’t so bad with tools even back then. When I was here, I met your uncle Angelo.”

“Tio Angelo,” Nina whispered.

“Right. He was funny. Charming. Different from any man I’d ever met,” Amos said. “He invited me into the house and led me down this very passageway, to a door he said led into ‘the great beyond.’ That’s what he called it. I asked him what he meant, and he said I had to swear never to tell anyone what was going on.”

Nina squeezed Amos’s hand so hard that Amos winced. He was using his phone to light the passageway, flashing it over moss and busted wood and bits of char.

“Amos, I’m not going to like what you’re telling me, am I?” Nina whispered.

Far down the passageway came the sounds of Will and Fiona, saying they were okay. “We’re okay, Mom! We’re okay!”

Nina called back. “We’re okay, too!” Her voice was bright. “I remember cops coming around. I remember my uncle making food for them. Distracting them. Charming them.”

“I imagine he was good at that,” Amos said.

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