I nodded. “I get it.”
Riley continued, “Her dad kept threatening to send her back to the lockup psych ward place.”
“Guy’s a douchebag,” said Alex. “Has some fancy job trading bonds or something. He’s one of those guys who comes here for a few weeks every summer and walks around like he owns the place.”
“Lauren hates him,” Zoey said. “She says he represents everything that’s wrong with the world: patriarchy, mindless consumption and wealth, total lack of creativity and respect for the planet.”
“Right.” I got the picture. “So she’s miserable, fighting with her parents, and she started walking out to the cove every night? Did any of you guys ever meet her there?”
“Sometimes,” Alex said. “But mostly she went on her own.”
“She’d walk there along a path from her cabin,” Riley said.
“Tell her about the tree,” Skink put in.
“There’s a hollow tree there,” Riley explained, “and she kept her weed and cigarettes and shit there—stuff she didn’t want her parents to find. And one day she goes and there’s a flower in there. Then another day she goes and there’s a coin. Then a piece of sea glass.”
Zoey nodded. “Rattling Jane was leaving her gifts.”
“How did she know it was Rattling Jane?” I asked.
“She didn’t,” Zoey said. “Not at first. Not until Jane showed herself to Lauren.”
“So she just went one day and found Rattling Jane there waiting?” I asked.
“No way,” said Riley. “Rattling Jane doesn’t just show up and wait for you! You have to call her!”
“See,” Skink said. “Just like I told you.”
“So she called her?” I asked.
“Again and again, until she came,” said Zoey, still hugging herself, rocking a little. “She came up out of the water all draped in weeds and bones and leaves and shit like that. Lauren asked her where the rock was, if she could get a wish. And she… she whispered that Lauren had to earn it.”
“Earn it how?” I asked.
“She didn’t say,” Zoey said.
“But,” Riley continued, “she kept going back to the cove, and Rattling Jane would come when she called her. And she kept leaving little things for her in the hollow tree.”
“And then Rattling Jane supposedly gave her the rock,” Alex added. “The wishing stone. That’s what she said, anyway. She showed it to us.”
“What’d it look like?” Skink asked.
Alex shook his head, gave a disgusted little laugh. “Like nothing. Like literally just a regular rock.”
I looked out at the water, watched the way the sunlight played on the surface, making it glisten and sparkle as if it were really touched by magic; maybe it really was a place where a creature made of sticks and weeds and vengeance dwelled.
“When was the last time you saw Lauren?” I asked.
“The day she went missing,” Zoey answered. “She was all upset. Said she’d ruined things by talking to us. That Rattling Jane knew and was mad at her for telling and showing people the stone. She wasn’t going to give her her wish.”
Skink kicked at the ground. “Man, you don’t want to piss off Rattling Jane.”
“There is no fucking Rattling Jane,” Alex declared, smacking the wooden boards of the table. “It was all just a stupid story Lauren told to get attention. The girl’s fucked in the head. Fact!”